Sep 20, 2020,08:30am EDT Bruce Japsen Senior Contributor
More than three million American workers lost health insurance
coverage this spring and summer from their employers as the pandemic and spread
of Covid-19 triggered massive job losses, a new study shows.
In all, there were 3.3 million adults under the age of 65 who
lost employer-sponsored health insurance and almost two-thirds of them, or 1.9
million, “became newly uninsured from late April through mid-July,” according to a new
analysis by The Urban Institute and funded by the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation. The loss of employer coverage has hit Hispanic adults
particularly hard with 1.6 million losing health benefits, Urban Institute
researchers said.
And it could get worse.
“With continued weakness in the labor market, researchers
conclude federal and state policymakers will need to act to prevent job losses
from leading to further increases in uninsurance,” the authors of the report
wrote about their analysis, which was derived from 2020 U.S. Census
data.
In particular, the analysis underscores the need to expand
health benefits, particularly Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, analysts
say. The ACA dangled billions of dollars in front of states to expand Medicaid
coverage for poor Americans but 12 states generally
led by Republican Governors or legislatures have refused while
President Donald Trump and his appointees at the U.S. Justice Department fight
led by Republican Governors
“The danger of an inadequate safety net can be seen in the
non-expansion states, where the number of uninsured adults has already
increased more than 1 million,” Robert Wood Johnson Foundation senior policy
advisor Katherine Hempstead said in a statement accompanying the report.
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