Study: When health insurance costs rise, productivity drops

Study: When health insurance costs rise, productivity drops

A new working paper from Truven Healthcare’s Teresa Gibson, Harvard’s Michael Chernew and the University of Michigan’s A. Mark Fendrick find that as co-payments go up, productivity drops — most likely as a result of employees skipping out on care altogether.

The team focused on those with chronic pain such as arthritis. They then looked at how much employees had to pay for prescription medication under their various benefit structures. Previous research has shown that as the cost of health-care services increases, usage decreases — workers simply don’t fill as many prescriptions when prices get higher.

On average, employees with chronic pain had 76.7 hours absent from work. But with every $5 increase in cost-sharing for pain medications, they saw an increase in absenteeism somewhere in the ballpark of 1.3 to 3.1 percent.

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