Household Preferences and Joint Decisions on Employer-Provided Health Insurance Access

This paper examines how spousal access to employer-provided health insurance (EPHI) affects preferences to acquire the same access at both the individual and household level. Regarding household decision process as a cooperative, simultaneous game between husband and wife, the empirical results show that spousal access to EPHI is negatively related to own EPHI access, indicating that household members as a unit prefer single EPHI access to dual access. Using family income share as a proxy for individual indirect utility, this study shows that the husband's incremental disutility of having spousal EPHI access is greater than that of the wife.