Summary
IRA and Keogh Assets Grew by 16 Percent During 1996—Total assets held in individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and Keogh plans (retirement plans for the self-employed) reached a high of $1.4 trillion as of year-end 1996. Between 1985 and 1996, total assets held in IRAs and Keogh plans increased 524 percent. During 1996, IRA and Keogh assets grew 15.7 percent, compared with a growth rate of 24.7 percent between 1994 and 1995, 9 percent between 1993 and 1994, and an average annual growth rate of 18.2 percent between 1985 and 1996. Most of the recent growth was due to rollovers from qualified retirement plans, not from new contributions to the accounts. In addition, recent evidence suggests that distributions are increasingly more likely to be rolled over into another qualified retirement vehicle than they were in the past.
Estimates of the Percentage of Employers Offering Self-Funded ERISA Health Benefit Plans and the Number of Participants in These Plans—An employer can provide health benefits in one of two basic ways. The employer can purchase a health insurance contract (or a health maintenance organization (HMO) contract) so that a health insurer will pay for the employees' health care claims, or the employer can self-fund (self-insure) its employees' health benefits by paying for their health care claims directly out of its own income or assets. Because the way that health benefits are provided determines how they are regulated, it is important for policymakers to understand how many individuals fall into each of these two categories when they make policy decisions. This article provides the latest estimates of the percentage of employers offering self-funded ERISA health benefit plans, i.e., plans governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, and the number of participants in these plans. (ERISA health plans are all health plans offered by employers except for federal, state, and local government employee plans and plans offered by churches to their employees.)