ESI employer premium contributions as a first-class, validated resource component

[MaxGhenis]

Motivation

Employer-sponsored insurance premium contributions are the largest health subsidy absent from Populace's resource surface. Dense builds impute employer_sponsored_insurance_premiums (~$1.13T at f0af251, right scale against KFF EHBS employer-share benchmarks), but:

1. The column dies in sparse exports (Sparse-57k export drops 94 no-formula input columns from the dense parent (tips, overtime, disability flags, ESI premiums, rent, QBI basis) #361 inventories it among the 94 dropped inputs) and was never stored in the retired us-data lineage — the IARIW OBBBA paper (PolicyEngine/obbba-paper) found it computes $0 on eCPS 1.73.0 and had to document ESI as a levels-omission in its resource measure.
2. No calibration target or validation gate anchors it. A CBO-comparable household-resources measure counts employer premium contributions as income; without an external anchor the imputation can drift silently.
3. ESI status gates real policy interactions: an affordable-ESI offer blocks marketplace PTC eligibility, and ESI/Medicaid churn matters for coverage analyses. A live, validated ESI input makes those model pathways meaningful rather than degenerate.

Proposed work

• Carry employer_sponsored_insurance_premiums (and the ESI offer/coverage flags it pairs with) through every release class — wire into the Sparse national-only release never persists input columns for tips/overtime/auto-loan/education/retirement-contribution/casualty/misc bases (absent-from-H5, engine defaults to 0) #340/Sparse-57k export drops 94 no-formula input columns from the dense parent (tips, overtime, disability flags, ESI premiums, rent, QBI basis) #361 input-coverage gate so sparse exports fail without it.
• Add a Ledger fact + calibration or validation target for aggregate employer premium contributions (NHEA sponsor-of-funds employer share, or KFF EHBS average premiums × employer share × covered lives; state-level if a defensible source exists).
• Release gate: aggregate within a stated tolerance of the external anchor, plus a nonzero-mass check.
• Document the resource-concept role: ESI belongs in the CBO-style "income including health benefits" surface alongside Medicaid/CHIP/PTC.

Acceptance

A release's stored ESI premiums aggregate within tolerance of the documented external anchor on both dense and sparse artifacts, with the gate red if the column is absent or zero-mass.

Consumer

PolicyEngine/obbba-paper (IARIW 2026): methods currently disclose "employer contributions to health premiums, which CBO's income measure also counts, are absent from this file" — this issue is the permanent fix.

[MaxGhenis]

Claiming: ESI employer-premium anchor sourcing (NHEA sponsor-of-funds / NIPA 7.8 class) underway together with the #451 quartet facts; export carry-through + gate wiring rides the same Build N branch. — populace owner session

[MaxGhenis]

ESI anchor sourcing complete (values read from fetched official tables today):

• CMS NHEA (2024 release, data through CY2024), Table 24 "Employer-Sponsored Private Health Insurance", row "Employer Contribution to Private Health Insurance Premiums": $975.7B (2023), $1,047.0B (2024) — all employers (private $709.0B/$753.4B + federal $44.1B/$46.7B + state/local $222.6B/$247.0B). Total ESI premiums (employer+employee): $1,333.5B/$1,429.1B; employer share 73.2%/73.3%. Includes retirees/COBRA per the NHEA definitions PDF. (cms.gov/files/zip/nhe-tables.zip)
• BEA NIPA Table 7.8 line 17 "Private group health insurance" [B4923C]: $923.2B (2023), $1,002.9B (2024) — employer contributions as compensation supplements, incl. government employers' contributions to privately administered plans, excl. the employer Medicare HI payroll tax. (apps.bea.gov/national/Release/XLS/Survey/Section7All_xls.xlsx, published 2025-09-26)
• Private-business-only variant (NHE Tables 5-1/5-6): $708.7B/$753.1B.

Concept flag before the gate lands: the dense f0af251 imputation ($1.13T) exceeds BOTH employer-share anchors ($0.98–1.05T) and sits well under total premiums ($1.43T). First step of the gate work is pinning which concept employer_sponsored_insurance_premiums encodes in policyengine-us — if employer-share, the imputation is ~8–15% hot against 2024 anchors; if total-premium, it is ~21% cold. Tolerance and anchor choice follow from that determination, not the other way around.

[MaxGhenis]

Concept check resolved (read from the released engine, policyengine-us 1.764.6): employer_sponsored_insurance_premiums is documented as "Annual employer-paid health insurance premiums. CBO treats this as part of household market income" — employer share, person-level, uprated by the CBO employment-income series. So the anchor is the employer-contribution class, and the concept-matched candidates are:

• CMS NHEA Table 24 "Employer Contribution to Private Health Insurance Premiums": $975.7B (2023) / $1,047.0B (2024) — includes government employers, retirees, COBRA (broadest match to a person-level employer-paid concept).
• BEA NIPA 7.8 line 17 [B4923C]: $923.2B (2023) / $1,002.9B (2024) — excludes publicly administered government funds.

Implication: the dense f0af251 imputation (~$1.13T) is ~8% above the broadest 2024 employer-share anchor, not between concepts as previously hypothesized — the validation gate should target NHEA Table 24 with a stated tolerance, and the imputation likely needs a modest trim when the gate first binds. Receipts for both anchors are on #451.

[MaxGhenis]

Two facts pinned while sequencing this against Build N, one of which descopes it from the N release:

1. Concept pinned (anchor selection unblocked). employer_sponsored_insurance_premiums in policyengine-us is a person-grain input documented as "Annual employer-paid health insurance premiums. CBO treats this as part of household market income" — the employer share, not the total premium. So NIPA 7.8 employer contributions for group health insurance ($1,002.9B CY2024) and the NHEA sponsor-of-funds employer share ($1,047.0B CY2024 class) are two estimates of the same concept (~4% apart), and the gate anchor should be one of them with the other as a cross-check — not a total-premium series. The banked ledger fact drafts from 7/19 can proceed on that basis.

2. The column has no live producer in the current lineage — this cannot be a "carry-through" fix. The declared meps_esi_premiums stage (MEPS-IC priors over ASEC policyholder fields, per the archived eCPS derivation at 42ed5d45) is a recorded parity known-gap with hard evidence: the retired derivation requires NOW_OWNGRP, NOW_HIPAID, and NOW_GRPFTYP, and all three sha-recorded 2022–2024 ASEC h5 inputs omit them (only PHIP_VAL survives; has_esi/NOW_GRP are recorded as semantically invalid substitutes). The ~$1.13T dense figure in this issue's motivation came from a pre-hermetic lineage that still had those fields. Today's builds — including Build N — produce nothing for this column, which is exactly what the obbba-paper methods disclosure already says.

So the deliverable splits: Build N ships with the documented known-gap unchanged (no regression — the gap predates it), and this issue becomes the source-restoration decision: (a) re-pull ASEC vintages carrying the NOW_* trio into the sha-pinned inputs and run the archived derivation, or (b) design a PHIP_VAL+MEPS-priors derivation that doesn't need the trio. (a) preserves the fenced method; (b) is new methodology needing its own validation. That's a scoping call for the data-inputs lane, not a release-window patch.