Researchers in the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center are committed to understanding how lives can be protected by sound policies and access to quality health care. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve turned our attention to informing policies aimed at safeguarding access to health care, especially for the most vulnerable populations, including the 48 million people who, according to our projections, are related to a worker who will lose their job because of the pandemic. And losing a job often means losing health insurance.
The Health Policy Center invites you take a look at some of our data-backed research on COVID-19’s effects on health insurance coverage. Stay tuned for new study findings and analyses, guiding sound policies and improved access to health care.
Learn more about the Health Policy Center’s expertise, research, and commitment to a safe and healthy nation for all.
Much uncertainty surrounds when and how insurance coverage will change because of the COVID-19 recession. Urban compared four studies on employment-based health insurance coverage to help lawmakers address these important questions and make sense of the wide variation in publicly available data.
Using our Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model, we project 48 million people will live in families with a worker who experiences a COVID-19-related job loss in the last three quarters of 2020, with 10.1 million of those people losing health coverage tied to that job and 3.5 million becoming uninsured.
The recession brought by the COVID-19 pandemic is testing the health care safety net established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Our new findings suggest the ACA may be protecting adults who lose jobs from becoming uninsured, even as a challenge to the law before the Supreme Court would, if successful, place approximately 20 million Americans at risk of becoming uninsured.
Our study showed that if unemployment climbed to 20 percent, 25 million people could lose their employer-sponsored health insurance under a base case scenario, and in a high scenario, 43 million would lose employer-sponsored coverage.
Early in the pandemic and recession, Urban researchers predicted that steep increases in Medicaid coverage would strain state budgets, restricting already limited resources in the very communities hit hardest.
Losing a job may mean losing both income and private health insurance, but many of the newly unemployed may not realize they and their dependents may be eligible for Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), or Marketplace subsidies. Our analysis explores coverage eligibility among workers in industries most vulnerable to pandemic-related job loss.
By taking aggressive advantage of the flexibility permitted by Medicaid and CHIP statutes, policymakers can help people obtain, retain, and make optimal use of critical health coverage that can help them weather the pandemic.
