Layoffs lay bare shortcomings in health care system
By Jared Bernstein / Special to The Washington Post
One of the most shocking economic impacts of our efforts to fight the coronavirus is the off-the-charts increase in layoffs. Initial claims for unemployment benefits rose to almost 17 million in the past three weeks; previously, the largest three-week increase on record was about 2 million.
Many of us in the economic policy world see numbers like that and think of Unemployment Insurance, checks to households, help for businesses with crashing revenue. To their credit, once they grasped the urgency of the economic crisis, Congress and the White House acted quickly on such measures (though their implementation remains a serious problem).
But while the bills thus far included useful health measures — including $4 billion for the Centers for Disease Control, insurance coverage with no cost-sharing for coronavirus testing (though not treatment), and $100 billion for hospitals — critical omissions remain. The most salient is the failure to expand health coverage. Given that most working-age Americans and their families get health coverage through work (58 percent, pre-virus), in a period of massive layoffs, this omission must be corrected.
The intersection of a health and economic crisis is particularly dangerous for low-income families with few resources to fall back on should they get sick. Fortunately, the expansion of Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act will significantly reduce this risk for such families, in states that took the expansion. But low-income families in states that have either not signed on to the expansion, or have done so in ways that depress enrollment, face real hardship that could be mitigated by forthcoming legislation.
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