TABLE 7.

Health Insurance and Other Labor Costs

Study	Key Findings
Card and McCall 1996	Workers with low probabilities of medical coverage are no more likely to report a Monday injury than are other workers. Moreover, employers are no more likely to challenge the Monday injury claims of workers with low medical coverage rates than the claims filed by workers with high coverage rates.
Kessler et al. 1999	Depressed workers have more short-term disability days. Depressed workers were found to have between 1.5 and 3.2 more short-term work-disability days in a 30-day period than other workers had, with a salary-equivalent productivity loss averaging between $182 and $395. These workplace costs are nearly as large as the direct costs of successful depression treatment, which suggests that encouraging depressed workers to obtain treatment might be cost effective for some employers. Forty-five percent to 98% of the treatment cost would be offset by the increased work productivity.
Salkever et al. 2000	Employee fringe-benefit arrangements, including patterns of coverage for mental health treatment, were found to be important predictors of disability claims incidence rates. The proportion of health plans with high deductibles for mental health services was significantly and positively related to the number of claims. The fraction of plans with mental health carve-outs was negatively related to the number of claims. Mental health and health services availability and benefits variables showed virtually no significant effects on benefit payments for individual claims. Some employee disability-management strategies, such as front-line manager involvement and provision of alternative jobs for employees returning from disability leave, are predictive of lower claims rates and/or costs.