The obvious lesson of COVID-19: We need Medicare for All
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There's one country in the world that relies primarily on employers to provide health insurance to the bulk of its population, with about 160 million people getting their coverage from their job. And boy, does a pandemic show why the rest of the developed woThe obvious lesson of COVID-19: We need Medicare for All
There's one country in the world that relies primarily on employers to provide health insurance to the bulk of its population, with about 160 million people getting their coverage from their job. And boy, does a pandemic show why the rest of the developed world didn't follow that model. Because that 160 million was a pre-coronavirus count. With some 40 million people having filed unemployment claims from March to May, clearly there's a problem: no jobs, no job-based insurance. The Common Wealth Fund surveyed 2,271 adults across the nation from May 13 through June 2. They asked about job status for the respondents and their spouses as applicable, and what their current insurance status was. Among the people who had lost a job or had a spouse who'd lost a job, two out of five had their health coverage through work, and one in five of those people were now uninsured. So, yeah, a mass unemployment event like a pandemic means lots of people become uninsured. Read more