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Note: The Roosevelt Rundown will be off next
week for the Fourth of July holiday.
State Insurance Reforms
and the Trade-Offs of a Public Option
If the first wave ever ended, the
second has clearly begun: This past week saw the highest
volume of coronavirus cases since the pandemic
began—and the nation’s heath care system remains unprepared. Per the
Journal of General Internal Medicine, 18.2
million Americans at risk of severe COVID-19
illness are uninsured or underinsured, a group that disproportionately
includes Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people. With this Congress
unlikely to expand coverage under the 10-year-old Affordable
Care Act (ACA), states are exploring their own
options—including a public option. In a new report, Roosevelt Fellow
Naomi Zewde and Lafayette College’s Adam Biener analyze state-level
efforts in New Mexico, Colorado, and Washington and explore the
trade-offs policymakers face in balancing consumer affordability and
market stability. One takeaway: “The more price savings realized,
through reduced fees or administrative savings, the more disruptive a
public option may be.” Read
on.
- The COVID-19 effect:
“COVID-19 has both complicated these efforts and exacerbated
the consequences of earlier inaction,” Roosevelt Editorial Manager
Matt Hughes writes
for the blog. “Several states, including New York,
have proposed
Medicaid cuts to balance strained budgets.
Meanwhile, 14
states have still not adopted the Medicaid
expansions embedded in the ACA, depriving lower-income people of
health care they desperately need and disproportionately harming Black
people, who are more likely to live in these predominantly Southern
states.”
-
White supremacy is the preexisting
condition: “The corrective to the racial wealth divide must
come through structural change, not the actions of individuals,”
Roosevelt Fellow Darrick Hamilton co-writes for
Inequality.org. In a new report prefaced by
Hamilton; Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, and Omar Ocampo—all
of the Institute for Policy Studies—outline eight
post-COVID economic solutions that can reduce the
racial wealth gap, including Medicare for all and a federal jobs
guarantee.
What Is
Owed
In a New
York Times piece, Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones draws on the work of
Roosevelt Senior Fellow Sandy Darity and folklorist A. Kirsten Mullen
to explain why reparations must be central in closing the racial
wealth gap. “The process of creating the racial wealth chasm begins
with the failure to provide the formerly enslaved with the
40
acres they were promised,” Darity tells Hannah-Jones. “So the restitution has never been
given, and it’s 155 years overdue.” In
another NYT article, Darity observes the political shifts in
the last year: “It’s striking to me that people campaigning to be
elected officials are mentioning the word at all . . . There seems to be a sea change.”
- The road to
reparations: “As a prelude to a comprehensive program of
reparations for Black Americans, a parallel commission should be
mobilized to produce a report that details the case and a plan for
restitution. HR 40 provides the opportunity to establish such a
commission,” Darity and Mullen write in an op-ed
for The Grio. Read the latest coverage of their
reparations work in The
Guardian and The
Economist, and listen to Darity on
WBUR.
 A More Representative
Senate
In a historic vote, the House voted
today to approve statehood for Washington, DC, and overdue
enfranchisement to around 700,000 people—about 45
percent of whom are Black. Though it’s certain to
fail in this Senate, the vote spotlights the structural
racism embedded in some of the nation’s democratic
institutions. “The Senate entrenches white, male, rich rule, and will
do so for a long time in the future. And that’s kind of by design,”
Roosevelt Director of Governance Studies Todd Tucker tells
HuffPo. For the blog, Tucker explains another
potential benefit of DC statehood: reminding Americans that our
government institutions and Constitution are not immutable and have
never been this static. Read
more, and revisit Tucker’s 2019 report Fixing
the Senate: Equitable and Full Representation for the 21st
Century.
 Worker Power and Voice in the
Pandemic Response
In a report released this week,
Harvard Law School’s Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs expand upon their
Clean
Slate for Worker Power framework and propose comprehensive COVID-19 policy
interventions—in labor and beyond—to amplify worker voice, boost
workplace equity, and dismantle systemic racism. “Economic issues are
life-and-death issues” Block tells Annie Lowrey in
an Atlantic exclusive. “What COVID has done is illustrate the
life-or-death nature of those economic issues in a very accelerated
time frame.” Read
the full report.
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