Support for the ACA is sure to only increase in the face of the coronavirus, which has rendered the ACA and its individual health care marketplace more important than ever. On top of the 11.4 million Americans who already had ACA insurance in 2020 and 12.5 million enrolled in Medicaid expansion, the Economic Policy Institute estimated April 30 that approximately 12.7 million workers have so far lost their employer-based health insurance since the beginning of the pandemic alone. And those numbers could just be the tip of the iceberg, with the Urban Institute projecting that 25 million workers or more could ultimately lose their employer insurance due to unemployment caused by the COVID-19 crisis. Many of those workers are now likely to turn to ACA insurance or Medicaid, which was expanded under the ACA, potentially adding tens of millions to the number of Americans who would be affected by the Supreme Court’s decision. (The Trump administration, for its part, hasn’t done anything to help laid-off workers get health coverage more easily, refusing to call a special enrollment period for ACA insurance amid the coronavirus.)
Vanity Fair
May 7, 2020
The Indian workers allow investors and executives to expand stock values by shrinking payrolls for U.S. graduates. Most of the H-1B contract-workers are paid less than American graduates, according to a May report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Breitbart
May 7, 2020
“[Nurses] really are organizing to have a voice over life and death issues,” said Logan. Speaking generally of anti-union campaigns in the health care space, Logan said, “Hospital administrators still think that it’s appropriate to bring in outside consulting firms that cost millions of dollars.” Hospital anti-union campaigns can cost well over $1 million, a report from the Economic Policy Institute found last year.
The Intercept
May 7, 2020
Economists predict that the picture will grow even more dire Friday when the Department of Labor releases the first jobs report covering an entire month of shutdowns. Economists expect to see unemployment rates of 16 percent and record job losses of more than 20 million, said Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post
May 7, 2020
While it’s impossible to ignore the vast disparity between what top execs are paid compared with the average employee — as much as 278 times more, according to a 2019 Economic Policy Institute report — Hollywood business manager Evan Bell cautions against assuming that the huge gulf means top execs won’t be hurt financially by forgoing salaries. “Some CEOs have lifestyles where they might have a lot of assets, but they need their cash flow,” he says. “It’s not only optics to everyone, but to some people it is.”
The Hollywood Reporter
May 7, 2020
As in the UK and elsewhere, home health aides are financially forgotten – and heavily exposed to Covid-19. They make less than retail workers on average, says the BLS, as do drivers for services like Uber, according to Economic Policy Institute estimates. Bus drivers and postal workers get closer to the national average. Journalists, loan officers and morticians are among the luckier ones with above-average pay.
Reuters
May 7, 2020
Dr. Chris Beyrer, professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins, added that “occupational exposure” is expected to present higher risks for African Americans and Latinos as states move ahead with reopening. Only 16 percent of Latinos and 20 percent of African Americans are able to work from home, compared with 30 percent of white Americans, according to an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
May 7, 2020
What HIV teaches us is that social discrimination and the vectors by which disease spreads are inextricable. While slogans like “coronavirus doesn’t discriminate” serve an important awareness-raising function, coronavirus discriminates inasmuch as the society it operates within does. As a result, the largely black and brown corps of hourly service workers who, according to the Economic Policy Institute, are far more likely to be paid poverty-level wages than their white counterparts and therefore cannot afford to take time off, are disproportionately likely to come into contact with the virus. Additionally, that same class of individual is least likely to be able to afford the costs for treatment in the US for-profit healthcare system if and when they fall ill. And all the while, the risk of mass infection grows daily in the detention camps along the southern border that house the migrants Trump blames for the crisis.
Africa's Country
May 7, 2020
Lydia Boussour, senior U.S. economist for Oxford Economics, expects the report to show even more job losses — 28 million. She cites an Economic Policy Institute analysis noting that as many as 14 million Americans couldn’t file jobless claims because of swamped phone and computer systems.
USA Today
May 7, 2020