Unemployed, Uninsured and Falling Through the Cracks

surpassing Russia. India now has around seven hundred thousand COVID nineteen cases. Only the US and Brazil have more. India had one of the world's strictest lockdowns at the end of March, when the country reported fewer than one thousand cases, but infections have surged since June, when Prime Minister nor Und Remote eased restrictions to rescue the economy from collapse. A New Jersey company has one approval to make a portable COVID nineteen tests that delivers results in fifteen minutes.

The Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization for Beckton Dickinson to make the handheld product, which is around the size of a cell phone. It's part of a new class of tests that promised to make detecting the virus faster and cheaper. The first such test was cleared for US use in May. The country has struggled with the test shortage since the pandemics early weeks. That's led to long lines for testing in new hotspots like Arizona, Texas,

and Florida. Finally, data kind firms that in the US, black and Latino people are being harmed by the coronavirus at higher rates than whites. The New York Times reported on federal data that proves this data that was only made available after the newspaper sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Latinos and Blacks have been three times as likely to become infected and twice as likely to

die from the virus, according to the new numbers. And now for today's main story, as a second coronavirus wave threatens America. The virus has endangered the health of millions, not just because of the effects of COVID nineteen, but because a wave of job losses since the disease first

hit has left them without health insurance. I spoke to Bloomberg reporter Read Pickart, who explains that in other developed economies, the newly unemployed could rely on systems of universal healthcare, and I'm America, they've had to navigate a bewildering menu of options to figure out if they have access to have patched together safety. We know that the pandemic led millions of people to lose their jobs, So what does

that mean more broadly for healthcare? So more than half the US population relied on the workplace for health coverage before the pandemic hit. So when tens of millions of people lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic and the recession that it's spurred, millions of people found themselves not just out of work, but without health insurance.

And you know, the US is pretty unique in this way, and the fact that many other countries have, you know, a national health care system available to all regardless of your work status. But in the US, whether you have insurance or not, and therefore access to affordable healthcare largely depends on whether you have a job or not. So you know, Congress acknowledged that problem and set aside billions of dollars to help pay for COVID nineteen testing and

treatment for the uninsured. But that aid doesn't cover regular or more routine medical costs. And so when we talk about all of these people who lost health insurance because of the job losses during the pandemic, how many people are we actually talking So there are several estimates to how many people have lost their health insurance, and it largely depends on how you want to look at the losses.

So the Economic Policy Institute, for instance, estimated that more than sixteen million workers lost their employer provided health insurance as of early May. If you were to include dependence like spouses and children. The Kaiser Family Foundation actually estimated that almost twenty seven million people could have lost their employer responsive coverage and become uninsured between March and May.

And you know, the good news at least is that most of these people who lost their health insurance were in a position to join a family member's plan or qualify for Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act marketplace tax credits um and those are the tax credits that help reduce the costs of the private plans that you know could replace job space coverage for households with lower moderate incomes. But at least what we've found is that not everyone

fits into one of those buckets. So without Medicaid and without a subsidy, paying for health insurance is incredibly expensive and many people may choose to just go without. And the whole seemed to be even bigger in states that haven't expanded Medicaid, like Florida and Texas. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about Florida and Texas. What is unique about those states? So Florida and Texas are unique in the fact that that they have enormous populations, but

they chose not to expand Medicaid. So in those states, you know, if you don't qualify for an a s A subsidy UM, and you don't qualify for their normal Medicaid programs, you have this this gap that people are falling into, and the gap can be exacerbated by the fact that UM in those states, there have also been issues with people getting their unemployment insurance and getting UM

approved for it. So, for instance, UM I talked to someone in Texas who because it took them months to get their unemployment insurance approved and that they didn't have qualify for Medicaid. They ended up not qualifying for an A C A tax credit either because they couldn't show

that they had that income. When in fact, if they had gotten their jobless benefits in an appropriate amount of time, then then they would have qualified and and the costs would have been hundreds of dollars cheaper for that plan. And of course the delay in getting these jobless benefits is itself sort of a by product of the pandemic. Right, so many people are applying for unemployment benefits at the same time that people are having trouble even getting their

phone calls answered exactly. So so this is not something, um that is normal for that unemployment insurance system. It's they've gotten thousands and thousands of calls, and um, the systems and the websites have been completely overwhelmed by the amount of demand for these benefits, and and and so you just have this issue where you know, the pandemic

itself has exposed holes in America's safety net. So you know, those job losses strain the unemployment insurance system greatly, and so you know, many out of work Americans found themselves waiting weeks or even months for their entitled aid. Others found that they didn't even qualify. And you know, the loss of health insurance is just kind of the latest

issue to come to light. So, you know, while Medicaid and a c A have helped many more from going on an shirt UM, gaps remained, and those gaps show an entirely different way the kind of safety net is not quite working for all us workers. So is this going to continue to be an issue going forward? Is the problem going to get any better? When you know, labor market statistics start start taking up and the outlook looks more at beeat so what we've seen in the

weeks since these estimates were made. So so these estimates you know, are going up through May basically, and and since then we've gotten the employment reports from the Department of Labor for both May and June, and the labor market has changed a lot. Millions of people have been brought back onto employers payrolls, especially in things like food services, and the unemployment rate has dropped substantially from where it was,

though remains extremely high. But the problem is that this rebound that we're seeing in the jobs market UM is not exactly directly terrible to this problem being solved in terms of health insurance, and that's because of the way that these these rehirings are broken down. So the problem is that employees and sectors like food services, where a lot of those games have been seen, have relatively low

coverage rates for employer provided health insurance in the first place. Meanwhile, um, you know, sectors like state governments, which often provide health insurance, continue to lay off workers. So you know, you put that together, and on top of that, you have more than a million people apply for unemployment benefits each week, and we're seeing that people are continuing to lose their

jobs at an alarming rate. What does this kind of tell us about the strength of our safety net and about what might happen in the future with the way that we think about how Americans are insured. This is the first recession that we've been in where we've had the Affordable Care Act, and there's no doubt when all of this is said and done with that the a c A will have kept many from going uninsured in

the wake of losing their employer sponsored coverage. But I think what it really shows is that in the best of times, the safety net misses some people. And when we talk about health insurance, we I think we've learned that pairing extreme job loss with that patch together safety

net has let millions of people fall through. And now some people are finding themselves in a scenario where they're having to decide, well, do I pay hundreds of dollars towards having health insurance because my employer sponsored health coverage is gone, or perhaps because my state decided not to expand Medicaid? Where do I put food on the table or pay my bills? And I think that is a very unique problem America is facing um and one that's

really hard to swallow. That was read Picker. You can read her story with John Tazzi on Bloomberg dot com. And that's it for our show. For coverage of the outbreak from bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by two

for foreheads, Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson and Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Red Picker. Original music by Leo sidri Our. Editors are Rick Shine and me Francesco. Leading Bloomberg's head of podcasts is