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Category Archives: Unemployment
Newly uninsured can turn to stable ACA market
People losing their employer-based health insurance in the coronavirus economy would find a pretty stable Affordable Care Act market if they need it — not that the Trump administration is advertising that fact, Bob writes.
Why it matters: ACA plans will be an important backstop for some newly uninsured people, many of whom could likely find affordable coverage on the law’s insurance marketplaces.
Where it stands: The average monthly premium for ACA coverage was down 3% in this year’s enrollment period, compared with 2019, according to a federal report that was released earlier this month but not publicly promoted.
- That average monthly premium is $595, but the overwhelming majority of enrollees get a subsidy to help cover those costs — and people who have just lost a job could be eligible for those.
- Some people “could get paid to buy ACA plans” right now because of looming insurance company rebates, according to Duke University health insurance researcher David Anderson.
Yes, but: You won’t hear much about those options from the Trump administration, which has been consistently hostile to the ACA and has declined to open up a special enrollment window that would let anyone who has been disrupted by the economic shutdown to buy coverage.
We can’t just flip the switch on the coronavirus
It feels like some big, terrible switch got flipped when the coronavirus upended our lives — so it’s natural to want to simply flip it back. But that is not how the return to normalcy will go.
The big picture: Even as the number of illnesses and deaths in the U.S. start to fall, and we start to think about leaving the house again, the way forward will likely be slow and uneven. This may feel like it all happened suddenly, but it won’t end that way.
What’s next: Nationally, the number of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. is projected to hit its peak within the next few days. But many big cities will see their own peaks significantly later — for them, the worst is yet to come.
- The White House is eyeing May 1 as the time to begin gradually reopening the economy. But that also will not be a single nationwide undertaking, and it will be a halting process even in the places where it can start to happen soon.
- “In principle it sounds very nice, and everyone wants to return to normalcy. I think in reality it has to be incredibly carefully managed,” said Claire Standley, an infectious-disease expert at Georgetown University.
The future will come in waves — waves of recovery, waves of more bad news, and waves of returning to some semblance of normal life.
- “It’s going to be a gradual evolution back to something that approximates our normal lives,” former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said.
What the post-lockdown world will look like:
- Some types of businesses will likely be able to open before others, and only at partial capacity.
- Stores may continue to only allow a certain number of customers through the door at once, or restaurants may be able to reopen but with far fewer tables available at once.
- Some workplaces will likely bring employees back into the office only a few days a week and will stagger shifts to segregate groups of workers from each other, so that one new infection won’t get the whole company sick.
- Large gatherings may need to stay on ice.
And there will be more waves of infection, even in areas that have passed their peaks.
- “Everything doesn’t just go down to zero” once a city or region gets through its initial crush of cases, said Janet Baseman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington.
- This is happening now in Singapore, which controlled its initial outbreak more effectively than almost any other country in the world but is now seeing the daily number of new cases climb back up.
This is all but inevitable in the U.S., too, especially as travel begins to pick back up. Some places may need to shut down again, or at least tighten back up, if these new flare-ups are bad enough.
- Part of the reason to lock down schools, businesses and workplaces is to prevent an outbreak from overwhelming the local health care system. If new cases start to pile up too quickly, leaders may need to pump the brakes.
- “If you go back to normal too fast, then cases start to go up quickly, and then we end up back where we started,” Baseman said.
- The good news, though, is that hospitals should have far more supplies by the fall, thanks to the coming surge in manufacturing for items like masks and ventilators.
What we’re watching: We’ll still need a lot more diagnostic testing to make this process work. Public health officials need to be able to identify people who might be spreading the virus before they begin to feel sick, and then identify the people they may have infected.
- Most of the U.S. does not seem prepared for that undertaking, at least on any significant scale.
- Another kind of test — serology tests, which identify people who have already had the virus and may be immune to it — will also help. We can’t test everyone, but identifying potential immunity could be important in knowing who can safely return to work in high-risk fields like health care.
The real turning point won’t come until there’s a proven, widely available treatment or, even better, a widely available vaccine.
- A vaccine is still about a year away, even at a breakneck pace and if everything goes right. A treatment isn’t likely to be available until the fall, at the earliest.
- In the meantime, all we can do is try to manage a slow recovery, using a less aggressive version of the same tools that are in place today.
The bottom line: “I’m not going back to Disneyland, I’m not going to take a cruise again, until we have a very aggressive testing system or we have very effective therapeutics or a vaccine,” Gottlieb said.
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Trump suggests doctors complain about lack of coronavirus equipment in order to get on TV
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-suggests-doctors-complain-lack-141500695.html
Donald Trump has implied doctors and elected officials say they do not have enough personal protective equipment (PPE) and other materials to get on television amid the coronavirus crisis.
The US president had a row with Jim Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, over the shortage of PPE, which includes essential gear such as hand sanitiser, gloves, aprons, and face masks, during his coronavirus press briefing.
Acosta said: “We hear from a lot of people who see these briefings as sort of ‘happy talk’ briefings. And some of the officials don’t paint as rosy a picture of what is happening around the country. If you look at some of these questions – do we have enough masks? No. Do we have enough tests? No. Do we have enough PPE? No.”
Mr Trump interjected: “Why would you say that? The answer is yes. I think the answer is yes.”
Acosta referred to doctors and other medical officials who have vented their frustrations about the dearth of essential equipment on CNN.
The president hit back: “A lot of it is fake news.”
Acosta said: “Doctors and medical officers come on our air and say ‘we don’t have enough tests, we don’t have enough masks’.”
Mr Trump chipped in: “Well yeah, depending on your air they are always going to say that because otherwise, you are not going to put them on.”
The spat comes as doctors and healthcare workers across America are battling against a shortage of face masks which safeguard them against coronavirus – sparking fears doctors will not be able to provide life-saving care if they fall ill.
America has become the first country in the world to record more than 2,000 people dying from coronavirus in one day alone, according to Johns Hopkins University figures.
People who contract coronavirus in the US are at greater risk than those in the UK or Canada due to America not having a national health service.
Americans are at risk of running up bills for coronavirus treatment which force them to fork out tens of thousands of dollars. The situation is exacerbated by the fact many have lost their healthcare insurance due to job losses linked to the pandemic.
When the coronavirus lockdowns end, we will live in a shrunken world
https://www.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-lockdowns-end-live-shrunken-122800321.html
- A projection from the Department of Homeland Security, published by the New York Times, shows coronavirus cases spiking again at the end of summer.
- It’s a stark reminder that American life after lockdown will still be one of limited human interaction. And that means we’ll have to live with a smaller economy too.
- The economy will be packed with uncertainty given the possibility of another shelter-in-place order.
- Until we can all hang out again with confidence, the US economy is going to be a shell of its former self.
When the US emerges from its various shades of shelter-in-place orders, it will emerge to a shrunken global economy. One that will not easily be inflated living within parameters the coronavirus demands.
Financial transactions are a form of human interaction, and even after strict orders to stay at home are lifted, Americans will need to limit human interaction to mitigate the spread of coronavirus. One projection from the Department of Homeland Security, first reported by the New York Times, imagines a world where schools remain closed, 25% of Americans work from home, and social distancing remains in place through the summer.
And people will still be scared. They will know that there is an deadly virus infecting people who interact with other people.
In this scenario, back to work doesn’t mean back to growth because people won’t be spending money the way they did before. Back to work simply means finding a more sane, stable way to maintain society until we get a vaccine. There will be no V-shaped recovery. This is a marathon, and if we’re lucky, we will limp across the finish line.
As incomplete as it is, China is the best picture we have for understanding what a life after lockdown looks like, and it doesn’t look like a booming economy. 460,000 businesses closed permanently in China during the first quarter.
One Chinese county has gone back into lockdown already. In Beijing — where state media says epidemic prevention and control will “probably” become “long-term normal” — restaurants have been ordered to maintain social distance by cutting seating in half and limiting tables to three people. Customers have been slow to come back anyway.
All of this is to say that even if we’re out of lockdown, this saga isn’t remotely over.
Deflation strikes back
What China’s economy is telling us is that once this weird supply funk brought on by everyone staying home is over, and some people are able to go back to work, we’ll still have a demand crisis. Even though the virus has been contained analysts at Oxford Economics told clients it expects to see “basically no growth” in China this year. With other global economies weakened it will sell fewer exports.
Zhu Jun, director of the international department of the People’s Bank of China, said that there’s a small chance the world risks another Great Depression. Cheery, I know, but until there’s a vaccine, optimism will be in short supply.
Here in the US, just as in China, people will be broke and businesses will be broken. Money will be scarce. Demand will be depressed not just because of a lack of funds, but because people will have changed their behavior to avoid getting sick.
Wall Street it seems, hasn’t processed this bad news yet. It’s taking this pandemic day-by-day, not looking at life after lockdown. This week the market rallied on news that all over the US, even New York City, the curve is flattening. It was a silly rally.
It’s silly for the market to declare victory before we’ve even seen how much damage has been done (that will take months at least). It’s silly to expect any kind of stability until we know what kind of demand a post-shelter-in-place, pre-vaccine American economy will have.
Finally, we don’t know how long Washington will be in a giving mood. So far the Federal Reserve has pulled out all the stops, and Congress has approved trillions in aid. But will Washington keep sending checks to unemployed Americans until we have a vaccine?
We thought we knew uncertainty
I think back to all the times I’ve heard CEOs and Wall Street types talk about uncertainty around regulations, or elections, or literally anything else that has happened in my life time, and I have to laugh. All of it seems silly compared to the uncertainty before us right now.
It is quite possible that sometime this summer scientists will develop a treatment for COVID-19 that makes the symptoms much more mild — something more like a standard, week-long flu. That discovery could make things a lot easier, and really bolster confidence enough to bring the economy back until we have a vaccine. But government officials obviously can’t plan with that in mind. Neither can businesses.
And so, those charged with imagining the worst case scenario must imagine a world where Americans are again forced to shelter-in-place to flatten the curve. Homeland Security’s projections put a resurgence of the virus somewhere around the end of summer to the beginning of fall. It’s not unreasonable to think certain populations may have to go back into shelter-in-place then.
Singapore has a robust system of testing for and tracking the coronavirus and its citizens went back into shelter-in-place this week. Here in the US we don’t have such a system. Last week the White House ended federal funding for its drive-thru testing site program.
On Friday New York Governor Andrew Cuomo urged the President to invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of antibody tests that can show who has been infected with the coronavirus and built up immunity. That would allow people to go back to work, but the federal government will only be able to produce 2,000 a day in the next two weeks.
As a nation, we need to be doing everything we can to ensure that when this lockdown is over, those who can go out can do so with as much confidence as possible. We need to inject as much certainty into this situation as possible Without testing, that’s not happening.
In an interview with CNBC, Bill Gates — the Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist who has dedicated a significant chunk of his charitable efforts to studying pandemics — said the federal government simply doesn’t seem interested in a unified testing system. This is one of the few variables in this pandemic the government can control, and it’s blowing it.
Testing is one of the only things that will make our beleaguered, shrunken coronavirus economy a little bit bigger. It’s one of the only ways we can impact the ugly twist of this economic downturn, behavior.
Even then, though, the possibility of an outbreak in a workplace, city, or state will change the way our economy works in ways that will make money scarce. We need to be ready for that.
Timeline: How the U.S. fell behind on the coronavirus
Early missteps allowed the new coronavirus to spread throughout the U.S for weeks before state and local officials implemented strict lockdowns designed to keep the pandemic from spinning further out of control.
Why it matters: The U.S. missed the boat on the kind of swift, early response that would have been most effective, and has been scrambling to catch up ever since. This timeline, compiled from official sources as well as media reports, shows how that all-important time was lost.
Dec. 31, 2019: China reports the novel coronavirus to the World Health Organization.
Jan. 6: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel notice for Wuhan, China.
Jan. 15: The first U.S. case is confirmed, in a man who traveled from Wuhan.
Jan. 17: The World Health Organization publishes a protocol for manufacturing coronavirus tests.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opts to develop its own test instead of using the WHO’s.
Jan. 30: The WHO declares global health emergency.
- The CDC confirms person-to-person spread of COVID-19 within the U.S.
Jan. 31: The Trump Administration suspended entry into the U.S. for most foreign nationals who had traveled to China in the past 14 days.
- The WHO reports 11,950 coronavirus cases worldwide.
Feb. 5: The CDC begins shipping its diagnostic tests to state and local health agencies.
Feb. 8: Labs report problems with the CDC’s tests.
Feb. 24: President Trump tweets: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
Feb. 29: Washington state reports the first COVID-19 death in the U.S.
- The Food and Drug Administration allows academic labs to develop and begin testing coronavirus testing kits while reviewing pending applications.
- The WHO reports 86,604 coronavirus cases worldwide.
March 5: LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics launch coronavirus test for commercial use.
March 9: Trump tweets: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”
- The WHO reports 114,381 coronavirus cases worldwide.
March 13: Trump declares a national emergency, freeing up $50 billion in federal funds for states and territories.
March 15: 33 states and the District of Columbia closed public schools, according to Education Week. This included the New York City school system, the largest in the country.
March 16: Trump advises Americans to self-isolate for 15 days.
March 19: Trump signed into law an emergency coronavirus relief package for paid sick leave and free testing.
March 23: 9 states had stay-at-home orders.
- Washington, Oregon, California, Louisiana, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
March 26: The U.S. now leads world in coronavirus cases.
- 12 more states issue stay-at-home orders, totaling 21: Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, Hawaii, Connecticut, Vermont and Delaware
March 29: Trump extends social distancing measures to April 30.
March 30: Nine more states issue stay-at-home orders, bringing the total to 30.
- Governors say testing is still lacking in many states.
March 31: Trump warns of the potential for 100,000 to 240,000 deaths.
April 6: Twelve more states issue stay-at-home orders, bringing the total to 42.
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HENRY KOTULA 