Another Week, Another Seven Million Unemployed

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Well, actually 6.6 million is the total number of Americans who filed for unemployment insurance over the past week. The government just revised the previous week’s figure of 6.6 million upward to 6.9 million, however, so a kindred upward revision of this week’s total may yet be in the works.

In any event, a mind-boggling 17 million American workers have filed for unemployment insurance in the past three weeks.

As I noted yesterday, Health Management Associates has calculated that should unemployment rise to 17.5 percent—a middling estimate, far from the highest estimates now circulating around—that would mean that 23 million Americans would lose their health insurance.

Up to now, the critics of Medicare for All have focused on the problem—the political problem—of confronting so many Americans with the prospect of losing their employer-provided insurance. That political problem is perforce diminished when tens of millions of Americans actually lose their employer-provided insurance and effectively have nothing to replace it with. If they’re poor, they can apply for Medicaid; if they can afford it, and don’t live in the 38 states where the federal government administers the Affordable Care Act, they can buy into the ACA (President Trump has refused to re-open the sign-up period for the ACA in those 38 states). Both these options take time, of course, and time can be the very thing that people don’t have in the midst of a pandemic.

Not surprisingly, then, the percentage of Americans in Morning Consult polls who support Medicare for All rose by nine percentage points, to 55 percent, in the four weeks between Morning Consult’s February poll and its March poll.

So—at what level of unemployment and insurance loss does the debate over Medicare for All reach its tipping point? If one month from now, 75 million or 100 million Americans are without health insurance, and the coronavirus is still with us, will Joe Biden recognize it’s time to extend Medicare, partly or fully, temporarily or permanently?

As Bernie Sanders has said, the former veep is a decent guy. At what point will Biden succumb to the demands of decency?

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