Revisiting the Wage-Health Insurance Trade-off: Evidence from the 2012 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey

Inspired by previous research, this paper examines the wage-health insurance trade-off using the most recent data from the MEPS. Through linear regression models, this paper first reaffirms previous finding that wage-health insurance trade-off may be subject to unobservable employee characteristics; second, it reaffirms the significance of conventional variables such as age, gender, race, education, geography, and industry on wage; third, it finds that discrimination against obesity exists in the wage-health insurance trade-off; fourth, it finds that discrimination against gender exists in the wage-health insurance trade-off, but may be industry specific; lastly, it finds that wage-health insurance trade-off may be in general industry specific. These findings have implications especially for obese workers.