The United States’ Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 improved and expanded availability of non-group health insurance. Previous studies have shown that women in the US workforce value health insurance more highly than men do. Because prior to the ACA self-employed individuals did not have guaranteed access to affordable health insurance coverage, women’s relatively lower rate of self-employment may partly have reflected their greater “job lock” due to employer-based health insurance. This article employs nationally representative survey data for 2009–18 and a quasi-experimental difference-in-difference modeling approach and finds that unmarried women’s probability of self-employment increased by 1.2 percentage points in 2015–18, after the ACA’s expansion of non-group health insurance came into effect. Among women who have never married, overall probability of self-employment increased by 1.2–1.5 percentage points versus trend, and the probability of transitioning into full-time self-employment increased by 0.9 percentage points.

HIGHLIGHTS

• In the US, unmarried women are less likely than men to be self-employed.

• The Affordable Care Act improved access to non-employer-based health insurance, reducing the cost of leaving jobs.

• As a result, from 2015–2018, unmarried women were increasingly drawn to self-employment.

• The ACA’s expansion of health insurance thus provides important economic benefits beyond healthcare access.

美国 2010 年的平价医疗法案 (ACA) 改进并扩大了非团体健康保险的可用性。先前的研究表明，美国劳动力中的女性比男性更看重健康保险。由于在 ACA 之前，个体经营者无法保证获得负担得起的医疗保险，女性相对较低的个体经营率可能部分反映了她们因雇主医疗保险而获得的更大“工作锁定”。本文采用 2009-18 年具有全国代表性的调查数据和准实验差分建模方法，发现在 ACA 扩大非自营职业后，未婚女性自营职业的概率在 2015-18 年增加了 1.2 个百分点团体健康保险开始生效。在未婚女性中，

强调

• 在美国，未婚女性自雇的可能性低于男性。

• 《平价医疗法案》改善了获得非雇主医疗保险的机会，降低了离职成本。

• 因此，从 2015 年到 2018 年，未婚女性越来越多地被吸引去自营职业。

• 因此，ACA 对健康保险的扩展提供了超越医疗服务的重要经济利益。