The Power of Suggestion: Automatic Enrollment and Employee Health Insurance Coverage Take-Up Rates

This study investigates the impact of automatic enrollment on employer-sponsored health insurance coverage take-up rates. To do so, we apply a propensity score matching technique that utilizes the Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting method in order to balance control and treatment groups, to a large dataset provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research Educational Trust (HRET) Survey of Employer Health Benefits that encompasses more than 3,500 companies. Our results suggest that automatic enrollment increases health insurance coverage take-up rates by 4.5 percentage points. Stated differently, our results suggest that if all eligible firms opted to use automatic enrollment, 8.7 million more individuals would retain private health insurance coverage (through their employers).