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https://hartmannreport.com/p/time-to-end-the-medicare-advantage
The simple solution to the Medicare Advantage problem is to kill off the program. It was just a Trojan horse to privatize Medicare
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Over 100 Democratic lawmakers last week introduced legislation to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60. There is one small problem that needs fixing, though: so-called “Medicare Advantage.”
This week my new book, The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich is officially available in bookstores nationwide and online. Here’s a chapter excerpt I think you’ll find interesting, particularly after all those awful TV ads with former football and sitcom stars we’ve had to endure the past few years…
The “Advantage” War against Medicare
Medicare Advantage is a massive, trillion-dollar rip-off, of the federal government and of taxpayers, and of many of the people buying the so-called Advantage plans.
It’s also one of the most effective ways that insurance companies could try to kill Medicare For All, since about a third of all people who think they’re on Medicare are actually on these privatized plans instead.
Nearly from its beginning, Medicare has allowed private companies to offer plans that essentially compete with it, but they were an obscure corner of the market and didn’t really take off until the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress rolled out the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. This was the GOP’s (and a few corporatist Democrats’) big chance to finally privatize Medicare, albeit one bite at a time.
That law created a brand known as Medicare Advantage under the Medicare Part C provision, and a year later it phased in what are known as risk-adjusted large-batch payments to insurance companies offering Advantage plans.
Medicare Advantage plans are not Medicare. They’re private health insurance most often offered by the big for-profit insurance companies (although some nonprofits participate, particularly the larger HMOs), and the rules they must live by are considerably looser than those for Medicare.
Even more consequential, they don’t get reimbursed directly on a person-by-person, procedure-by-procedure basis. Instead, every year, Advantage providers submit a summary to the federal government of the aggregate risk score of all their customers and, practically speaking, are paid in a massive lump sum.
The higher their risk score, the larger the payment. A plan with mostly very ill people in it will get much larger reimbursements than a plan with mostly healthy people. After all, the former will be costly to keep alive and healthy, while the latter won’t cost much at all.
Profit-seeking insurance companies, being the predators that they are, have found a number of ways to raise their risk scores without raising their expenses. The classical strategies of tying people to in-network providers, denying procedures routinely during first-pass authorization attempts, and having very high out-of-pocket caps are carried over from regular health insurance systems to keep costs low and profits high.
But with Medicare Advantage, the big insurance companies have invented a whole new way to rip us all off while padding their bottom lines.
For example, many Medicare Advantage plans promote an annual home visit by a nurse or physician’s assistant as a “benefit” of the plan. What the companies are doing, though, is trying to upcode their customers to make them seem sicker than they are to increase their overall Medicare reimbursement risk score.
“Heart failure,” for example, can be a severe and expensive condition to treat . . . or a barely perceptible tic on an EKG that represents little or no threat to a person for years or even decades. Depression is similarly variable; if it lasts less than two weeks, there’s no reimbursement; if it lasts longer than two weeks, it’s called a “major depressive episode” and rapidly jacks up a risk score.
The home health visits are designed more to look for illnesses or codings that can increase risk scores than to find conditions that require medical intervention. They’re so profitable that an entire industry has sprung up of companies that send nurses out on behalf of the smaller insurance companies.
In summer 2014, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published an in-depth investigative report titled Why Medicare Advantage Costs Taxpayers Billions More Than It Should.
They found, among other things, that one of the most common scams companies were running involved that very scoring of their customers as being sicker than they actually were, so that their reimbursements were way above the cost of caring for those people.
Here are a few quotes from the report:
“Risk scores of Medicare Advantage patients rose sharply in plans in at least 1,000 counties nationwide between 2007 and 2011, boosting taxpayer costs by more than $36 billion over estimated costs for caring for patients in standard Medicare.”
“In more than 200 of these counties, the cost of some Medicare Advantage plans was at least 25 percent higher than the cost of providing standard Medicare coverage.”
The report documents how risk scores rose twice as fast for people who joined a Medicare Advantage health plan as for those who didn’t.
Patients, the report lays out, never know how their health is rated because neither the health plan nor Medicare shares risk scores with them—and the process itself is so arcane and secretive that it remains unfathomable to many health professionals.
“By 2009, government officials were estimating that just over 15 percent of total Medicare Advantage payments were inaccurate, about $12 billion that year.”
Based on its own sampling of data from health plans, the report shows how CMS has estimated that faulty risk scores triggered nearly $70 billion in what officials deemed “improper” payments to Medicare Advantage plans from 2008 through 2013.
CMS decided, according to the report, not to chase after overcharges from 2008 through 2010 even though the agency estimated through sampling that it made more than $32 billion in “improper” payments to Medicare Advantage plans over those three years. CMS did not explain its reasoning.
The report documents how Medicare expects to pay the health plans more than $150 billion this year [2014, the year the study was published].
Companies are almost never nailed for these overcharges, and when they are, they usually pay back pennies on the dollar.
For example, when the Office of Inspector General, Health and Human Services (which oversees Medicare), audited six out of the hundreds of plans on the market in 2007, they found that just those six companies “had been overpaid by an estimated $650 million” for that one year. As the Center for Public Integrity states, “CMS settled five of the six audits for a total repayment of just over $1.3 million.”
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also, in 2012, decided to audit only 30 plans a year going forward. As CPI noted, “At that rate, it would take CMS more than 15 years to review the hundreds of Medicare Advantage contracts now in force.” And that’s 15 years to audit just one year’s activity!
Things haven’t improved since that 2014 investigative report from CPI. In September 2019, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and five Democratic colleagues sent a letter to President Donald Trump’s CMS administrator, Seema Verma.
“The recent HHS Payment Accuracy Report exposes that taxpayers have overpaid Medicare Advantage plans more than $30 billion dollars over the last three years,” Brown wrote. “This report comes on the heels of a 2016 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report and a 2013 GAO report on [Medicare Advantage] plan overcharges and the failure of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) to recoup billions of dollars of improper payments from MA plans.”
Meanwhile, during the four years of the Trump administration, CMS went out of their way to illegally promote Medicare Advantage plans (which typically cost CMS far more than a regular Medicare plan).
A February 2020 report in the New York Times stated, “Under President Trump, some critics contend, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers Medicare, has become a cheerleader for Advantage plans at the expense of original Medicare.”
The report pointed to the draft release of the 2019 Medicare & You handbook, which is mailed every year to all enrollees and posted online. “Advocates and some lawmakers criticized language describing Advantage as a less expensive alternative to original Medicare.”
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) compared Medicare Advantage with traditional Medicare and found the Advantage programs to be mind-bogglingly profitable: “MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending for enrollees in MA is 25 percent lower than for enrollees in [traditional Medicare] in the same county and [with the same] risk score.”
At the same time, Medicare Advantage often screws its customers. According to the NBER study, people with Medicare Advantage got 15 percent fewer colon cancer screening tests, 24 percent fewer diagnostic tests, and 38 percent fewer flu shots.
Speculation is rife as to why CMS would allow—much less promote—privatized plans that cost Medicare far more than original Medicare to rip off taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars a month.
One possibility is regulatory capture—people working in CMS know that if they go along and get along, very well-paid jobs are waiting for them at for-profit insurance companies after a few years of government service. This is a chronic problem at other regulatory agencies, particularly those overseeing pollution, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and banking.
Another answer is that the Bush administration—where Medicare Advantage started—was so enamored of the idea of privatizing Medicare to eventually destroy the program (George W. Bush campaigned extensively from the late 1970s through his presidency to privatize both Social Security and Medicare) that they turned a blind eye to abuses.
The Obama administration had other priorities, as they were trying to push through the Affordable Care Act and didn’t want to upset the apple cart. And when Trump came into power, his folks saw anything that drained resources out of Medicare and into the pockets of multimillionaire health insurance executives—a group notoriously generous when it comes to making political contributions—as a plus.
You Are Locked in to Medicare Advantage
A fellow I’d known decades ago recently bubbled back into conversation among a few of us who’d hung out together in New York back in the 1970s. Sam, I’ll call him, had turned 65 and hadn’t had employer-provided health insurance in years. He spent a few hours trying to figure out how to sign up for Medicare and then gave up, totally confused, figuring he’d try again in a few months.
Unfortunately, his prostate intervened. When Sam started experiencing pain urinating, he visited a local “doc in a box” urgent care clinic, where they gave him a PSA test. The result was shocking: his PSA was so high that it was a virtual certainty he had prostate cancer, and possibly it had even metastasized, a situation that is the second-leading cause of cancer death in American men.
Telling him that he’d be facing hefty doctor and hospital bills regardless of the outcome, the urgent care clinic signed him up for a Medicare Advantage plan offered by an affiliate that almost certainly paid them a commission for the sign-up. Sam was excited, though, because he now had insurance, and it was a “no dollar” plan that didn’t cost him a penny.
Sam then got on the phone to find a urologist who specialized in cancer. He found that the best worked out of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and, telling them he was “on Medicare,” he made an appointment to see one of their top docs. A month later, when his appointment finally opened up, the person who was checking him into the system told him that he’d have to pay cash because his Advantage plan didn’t include Sloan Kettering.
In fact, more than a third of all Medicare Advantage plans nationwide do not include any of the National Cancer Institute centers, and none of the Advantage plans offered in the New York City area include the nation’s most famous one, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Shocked, Sam contacted Medicare to see if he could transfer from Medicare Advantage to regular Medicare. This all happened in fall 2020, so they told him that he could make the change during the “open enrollment period” of October 15 to December 7. He made the change and called Sloan Kettering back.
This time, they wanted to know what Medigap policy he’d signed up for to fill in the 20 percent of billing that Medicare doesn’t cover. That sent Sam back to the internet and, ultimately, to an insurance agent, who told him that while Medigap plans can’t refuse you because of preexisting conditions when you first sign up when you turn 65, if you shift from Medicare Advantage back to traditional Medicare after that first enrollment, particularly if you’re older or sick, they can simply refuse to cover you.
Reporter Mark Miller wrote for the New York Times in February 2020 about Ed Stein, a 72-year-old man with bladder cancer and a Medicare Advantage plan that didn’t cover the cancer docs in his area who specialized in his type of cancer. He tried to shift back to traditional Medicare to cover what promised to be complex and expensive surgery and chemotherapy. As Miller wrote, “That was when he ran up against one of the least understood implications of selecting Advantage when you enroll in Medicare: The decision is effectively irrevocable.”
As of this writing (November 2020), my friend Sam still hasn’t seen a doctor. This is the state of healthcare in America as it’s been sliced and diced by the multibillion-dollar insurance industry.
Meanwhile, every fall, Americans are inundated with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of TV, direct mail, and internet advertising for Medicare Advantage plans. And where does the money come from to pay for that advertising?
It comes from the same place that provided over $1 billion in wealth to the former CEO of United Healthcare, and over $100 million a month in compensation to senior executives in the largest health insurance companies: denying claims while collecting risk adjustment claims from your tax dollars and mine.
The simple solution to the Medicare Advantage problem is to kill off the program. It was just a Trojan horse to privatize Medicare, and its presence will make Medicare for All even harder to implement. At the same time, the 20 percent hole that the GOP insisted on for skin in the game with real Medicare needs to go, too.
A comprehensive Medicare for All program will eliminate both of these problems.
https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/state-secrets
This is Boondoggle, the newsletter about corporations ripping off our states and cities. If you’re not currently a subscriber, please click the green button below to sign up. Thanks!
The Fort Wayne, Indiana, city council is going to vote on a 10-year property tax break for a new warehouse, which will be worth $16 million to the beneficiary. There’s an issue, though, beyond the potential loss of public money.
The city council doesn’t know who that beneficiary is.
It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. "I'm sure it's probably something that's going to be very exciting. They say up to a thousand jobs, you know, all these things coming. The taxpayers and the citizens, though, will be on us to make sure we specifically know what we're voting for," said one council member.
The city council doesn’t know which corporation it might be subsidizing because the few officials who have been let in on the secret — including the mayor — have signed non-disclosure agreements preventing them from divulging the corporation’s identity. Rumor has it that the warehouse will belong to Amazon, but no one will confirm it.
This is a great example of the pernicious use of non-disclosure agreements in economic development deals and how it corrupts local democracy.
There’s no national data on how prevalent these agreements are, but once you start looking, examples pop up everywhere. I’ve covered one here: The city council of Gallatin, Tennessee, approved nearly $20 million in tax breaks for “Project Woolhawk,” which turned out to be Facebook. Council members claimed they didn’t know Facebook was the beneficiary until after they voted. These agreements have been employed in New York, Minnesota, Ohio, and Maryland, too. Amazon, in particular, seems to make them a part of its standard operating procedure everywhere it goes.
And they cover more than just local economic development office officials or city council members and mayors. Amazon forced non-disclosure agreement for its HQ2 search onto university researchers, urban planners, the waitstaff at a restaurant where the local chamber of commerce met to discuss their city’s bid, and a hotel concierge.
These agreements generally prevent officials from discussing anything about the state of negotiations between the government and the corporation, other than vague details about the type of project and maybe the overall cost, and most of the time they only allow officials to publicly release information once the deal is done and confirmed.
Why do corporations insist on all this secrecy? To prevent pushback from the public.
In correspondence with a local official in San Jose, Google confirmed that the goal of the agreements was to prevent public relations problems in the community that might arise once word got out that Google would benefit from subsidies. A random tech project with a silly name isn’t as outrage inducing as Facebook, specifically, so corporations would prefer the former be the subject of debate.
Corporations push these agreements so often, in fact, that local officials just accept them as a matter of course. “It’s customary now, when mega-Fortune 500 companies come, that they prefer that you not divulge what they’re doing,” said the manager of the Village of University Park, an Illinois community that gave subsidies to Amazon. “It happens all the time.”
Even the Fort Wayne council members aren’t questioning the existence of the non-disclosure agreements, just that they weren’t also pulled into the loop and asked to sign one in exchange for receiving information before any vote occurs. “I'm happy to sign a non-disclosure, but either way, I don't want to be put in a position where I'm asked to make a decision without knowing what I'm deciding," said one council member.
But these agreements are an outrageous assault on the public’s right to know what’s being done in their name. Nobody is asking for these corporations or officials to divulge trade secrets or sensitive personal info on their employees; this is literally about whether and how public resources will be distributed, and what sort of negotiating stance public officials take when faced with a powerful corporation asking for money and other favors.
The use of these agreements is ultimately about power: Corporations want the power to extract concessions from elected officials without the countervailing power of public scrutiny being applied.
Fortunately, there is a very simple solution to this problem: States and cities can just ban non-disclosure agreements in economic development deals (and more widely, too, of course). Illinois Rep. Michael Halpin has a bill to do so in his state, and New York Sen. Michael Gianaris had one to do the same after the Amazon HQ2 debacle. Several New York City council members have proposed one there too.
Elected leaders can simply cut this strategy off at the knees with legislation that is just a couple of pages long. If any enterprising Indiana lawmakers who happen to read this newsletter want to introduce a bill, that’d be great. I’ll even email you the language if you want.
It’s impossible for citizens to effectively engage with their government if that government won’t even disclose the names of the entities with which it is doing business. Concerned voters are left fighting ghosts and vagueries instead of real institutions and specific policy choices.
Corporate leaders, of course, like it that way, but there’s no reason the rest of us have to put up with it. Call or email your state and local officials and tell them to ban these things today.
ONE MORE THING: Dr. Emily Erickson at Alabama A&M University put together a really fantastic report on how corporate tax giveaways have failed one Alabama community. She surveyed workers in Anniston, Alabama, and found them toiling away in dangerous jobs for bad pay, while “Anniston’s public services — parks, playgrounds, libraries, public safety, schools, and others — are underfunded in part because of the public subsidies (some call it “corporate welfare” or “corporate giveaways”) given to these large multinational corporations to entice them to locate in Anniston.”
Seriously, give it a read. It’s a great distillation of why the sort of stuff covered in this newsletter matters to real communities.
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https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/apple-schools-north-carolina
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This is Boondoggle, the newsletter about corporations ripping off our states and cities. If you’re not currently a subscriber, please click the green button below to sign up. Thanks!
Three years ago, Apple snubbed North Carolina when it chose a new campus location, instead landing, like so many tech corporations these days, on Austin, Texas. But playing hard to get turned out to be very lucrative for the iPhone and iPad designer: On Monday, North Carolina announced that Apple will open a new campus in the state, its first on the East Coast, in exchange for nearly $850 million in state taxpayer funds, as well as a big local property tax giveaway.
This is a massive deal, nearing Amazon HQ2 level in scope. And it’s a bad one for North Carolina. I’m going to key in on three of the worst aspects below, as they are regular features of problematic corporate incentive arrangements that North Carolina seriously amplified, particularly around education spending.
1) North Carolina is paying to “create” research jobs in a research hub. Apple’s new campus will be in an area that’s literally called the Research Triangle, because of its proximity to several top universities, two of them public, and tons of other large corporations doing R&D work. There’s every reason Apple would want to put a campus composed mainly of advanced research jobs — which is apparently the plan — in this location, tax breaks or no tax breaks.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, North Carolina officials and local leaders put a lot of effort into setting up the Research Triangle. Though, like many states, North Carolina has cut higher education spending deeply in the last decade, it still has some of the highest per-student outlays and lowest public college tuition rates in the country.
It’s those educational investments and human capital, not tax incentives, that were likely the draw for Apple. In fact, Google recently announced a new campus in the Research Triangle too, and said it was not asking for tax incentives. It was presumably attracted to many of the same aspects of the area that Apple was.
Something like the Research Triangle should, more than 60 years after it was created, be self-sustaining, and attractive enough to employers that there don’t need to be added incentives piled on top of it. And Google’s move shows that it absolutely can be. Meanwhile, giving away the store to Apple today means less money for tomorrow’s smart investments.
Not for nothing, if I were CEO of one of the other Research Triangle-based corporations, I’d be asking North Carolina where my $850 million is.
2) The deal is long and expensive. OK, now for the details. In return for creating 3,000 jobs, Apple will receive $845.8 million in payouts over 39 years from the state, plus a 50 percent reduction in its property tax bill over 30 years from Wake County.
The county incentives are going to be worth about $20 million, per the state Commerce Department. The state spending, meanwhile, comes from a program called Jobs Development Investment Grants. It involves a controversial practice dubbed “paying taxes to the boss,” under which taxes paid by Apple employees will not actually go into the state’s coffers, but will be sent back to Apple. In a decade, Apple will be receiving about 90 percent of its employees’ taxes back as payments.
The cost of these jobs is about $280,000 apiece, putting this deal near the top of the pile of most expensive subsidy arrangements, which makes sense as the JDIG program was expanded to give increased incentives to large tech corporations as part of North Carolina’s unsuccessful effort to win that previous Apple campus, as well as Amazon’s HQ2.
In one sense, though, the state is protected, since the subsidies are connected to particular jobs. But if, as I said above, Apple was going to come to North Carolina no matter what, then this is all money out the door that could have been spent on providing services to more North Carolinians. And even if Apple passed, presumably some other large tech corporation would be drawn to the same area, as not just Google, but Epic Games and Cisco were. There’s nothing so special about Apple that requires massive state spending in order to have it around.
Previous to this week’s announcement, Apple had already taken more than $320 million in public funds from North Carolina, mostly for a data center in Catawba County.
3) Apple will pay a pittance toward North Carolina education. And now back to schools. One of the details North Carolina officials included in their announcement was that Apple will spend $100 million on a “fund to support schools and community initiatives across the state.” This is a fairly typical aspect of these arrangements, letting the corporation buy some public relations benefits and positive stories in the local press.
But the math is obviously lopsided: Giving the corporation $850 million in taxpayer funds, which it then turns around and spends some fraction of on education initiatives, is just laundering taxpayer money through Apple.
Here’s a wild idea for education initiatives: Tax corporations and use the money to pay for them.
Yes, Apple makes fancy gadgets that a lot of people like, but it also causes several harms to communities and small businesses. North Carolina officials need to have more faith that their state’s investments in education and infrastructure will pay off — because they have and will — and not go groveling to big corporations that likely would do business with them on much more equal terms
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: I have a new Economic Liberties explainer out this week on the interstate compact against corporate tax giveaways. I hope the Q&A format makes it pretty accessible, and would love if folks could share it around, particularly with their state representatives. Every little bit helps.
ONE MORE THING: The very first piece I wrote for this newsletter was about the effect Amazon’s HQ2 would have on Northern Virginia, and particularly on some of the low-income communities where housing costs would likely spike. Here’s a story, right on schedule, about tenants in a Northern Virginia apartment building who have seen eviction cases go through the roof, and believe the owner’s plan is to flip the building to make way for Amazon employees.
CIM, the company that purchased the building, has initiated 27 percent of eviction hearings in the area recently, even though it holds only 9 percent of the rental units — which is indeed a very fishy set of numbers.
"Millions will suffer as they lose this critical source of income and the loss of spending will suppress job growth."
Millions of jobless workers are set to lose critical unemployment benefits in roughly 72 hours—and neither Congress nor the Biden administration seem prepared to do anything about it.
Despite the ongoing threat posed by the highly transmissible Delta variant, the White House and Democratic lawmakers have provided no indication that they plan to prevent several pandemic-related unemployment programs from expiring on September 6, which—in a cruel irony—happens to be Labor Day.
The consequences of government inaction in the face of what one analyst recently described as "the largest cutoff of unemployment benefits in history" could be massive, both for those directly impacted by the cuts and the still-ailing U.S. economy.
As Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project noted Thursday, the Labor Department's latest weekly unemployment insurance (UI) report shows that "9.2 million people are currently receiving benefits from either the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program or the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program," which were implemented last year to extend the duration of jobless aid and provide assistance to those who are typically ineligible for UI, such as gig workers.
"According to the Census Household Pulse Survey, the average household that is receiving UI benefits has 3.8 members in it," Bruenig observed. "This means that around 35 million people (10% of the U.S. population) live in households that are scheduled to lose unemployment income."
"These are not small cuts either," he continued. "Based on what happened in the states that already cut these benefits, we know that around half of those on UI will see their benefits drop to $0 while the remaining half will see their benefits cut by $300 per week, which is equivalent to $15,200 per year. Those formerly on UI will also cut their spending by about $145 per week ($7,540 annually), which will have negative effects on the revenue and employment of the businesses they patronize."
But even amid such dire warnings, the possibility of a UI extension has been virtually absent from discussions on Capitol Hill as Democratic lawmakers work to assemble a $3.5 trillion spending package aimed at achieving a range of longstanding policy goals, from major climate investments to Medicare expansion.
“The Biden administration has not made it a priority, and outside of Ron Wyden, you haven't heard too many people in the Senate be willing to push on that," Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told Vox, referring to the Democratic senator from Oregon, a key architect of the soon-to-expire UI programs.
"It doesn't seem like right now there would even be 50 votes in the Senate" for an extension, Stettner observed.
Last week, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that President Joe Biden believes it is "appropriate" for the $300-per-week federal UI boost to expire as scheduled. Twenty-six states—each led by a Republican governor except Louisiana—have already ended the emergency UI aid, and the Biden administration did not try to stop them.
Subsequent research has vindicated economists who warned that—contrary to the claims and predictions of Republican leaders—ending the benefits prematurely would do little to boost hiring. A Wall Street Journal analysis released Wednesday found that "states that ended enhanced federal unemployment benefits early have so far seen about the same job growth as states that continued offering the pandemic-related extra aid."
While Republicans have insisted that the emergency UI programs are dissuading people from returning to the workforce, analysts have pointed to the myriad other factors at play, including lack of child care and pandemic-related health concerns.
Dr. Rakeen Mabud, the chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, warned in a statement earlier this week that "amid increasing uncertainty in the trajectory of the pandemic, Monday's unemployment cliff could not come at a worse time."
"Millions will suffer as they lose this critical source of income and the loss of spending will suppress job growth, setting us back yet again in our efforts for an inclusive and equitable recovery," Mabud said.
Painful enough in itself, the benefit cut-off will come just days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration's nationwide eviction moratorium, putting millions of people at imminent risk of losing their homes amid a deadly pandemic. The U.S. is currently averaging around 164,000 new coronavirus infections and 1,500 deaths per day.
"It's going to be a perfect storm for a lot of folks," Jordan Dewbre, a staff attorney for the New York-based community organization BronxWorks, said of the confluence of UI expirations and the end of the eviction moratorium. "We are still in the middle of a pandemic."
In a series of tweets on Thursday, Stettner of the Century Foundation warned that "this cliff dwarfs anything we have seen before." If the federal programs expire, jobless workers will be left with often-paltry state-level UI benefits or—if they've exhausted their eligibility for such assistance—nothing at all.
"The unwillingness to extend emergency benefits—or even debate it—shows how inured we've become to plight of the unemployed," Stettner wrote. "With eviction protections ending at the same time, long-term unemployed workers are now vulnerable to lasting economic damage. Black and Latino workers have the least in savings built up to navigate this transitional period."
"Congress should have the courage to reinstate benefits, especially in high unemployment states, if the Delta surge slows the recovery," Stettner added, "and make permanent changes to UI benefits so that we won't have to rely on emergency programs during the next economic crisis."
