This. Employee shortages are not a good thing. Hawaii has been one of the tops in the nation regarding the unemployment rate. It's really hard to find good employees in everything from entry-level stuff to highly specialized roles. The post-COVID world will be interesting to navigate.
The recently unemployed and previously insured under their employers are all looking health insurance coverage.
Four ways they can get health insurance -
1. Enroll under a family member's plan
2. COBRA - pay the full price of insurance including their employers part
3. Enroll in Medicaid, which needs to meet state's eligibility requirements unless they loosen those.
4. For Medicaid expansion states who have their own exchanges and have opened them up due to special circumstances, enroll through those.
5. Should the fed government open the federal exchanges, select a plan through those.
Some projections on state's unemployment percentages by July 2020 has come out. Here's the highest ten states (some tied for last):
1. Nebraska - 19.7%
2. Louisiana - 18%
T3. Hawaii an Alaska - 17.8%
5. Mississippi - 17.5%
6. Delaware - 16.8%
7. Pennsylvania - 16.6%
T. 8. Missouri, West Virginia, Wyoming - 16.3%
One of the factors is "Pct. of workers in high-risk industries".
Nebraska's Pct of workers in high-risk industries is 33.5% (the highest)
Hawaii's is 27.1% (2nd highest)
Wyoming's is 25.5% (3rd highest)
Eleven states have opened their state-run exchanges in special open enrollment periods. None of the ten states above with the projected highest unemployment rates have state exchanges. California has enrolled over 58,000 people through their state-run exchange since they opened its special enrollment period.
Those states who chose not to participate in the Medicaid expansion, who prior to COVID had high poverty and high uninsured populations, as well as have a high percent of workers in high-risk industries and are experiencing higher job losses for those with employer sponsored health care benefits may have the most impact on their state's economies.
One of the sectors losing the most jobs is healthcare with over 43,000 jobs lost. Those jobs may not be considered "high risk" for job loss as others and may be difficult to project. I've seen a figure that of healthcare jobs only 58% have health insurance through their employer.
Each state may have its unique challenges, but we're all in this together.
You can't stop a pandemic, you can only slow it. If Biden had his way we wouldn't have halted travel, we could have had a lot more infected people coming into the country and spreading the disease faster than it has been. Governors on both sides of the aisle have complimented the administration on their response to COVID, if you want to be critical you should look at the WHO. They're supposed to be the experts and they came out at the beginning and advised that the virus wasn't a big threat. New York and New Jersey make up half of all the cases in the US, the rest of us have been doing pretty well containing this thing.
