A pandemic is a terrible time to lose health insurance coverage. Yet, for a segment of the 23 million workers who suddenly lost jobs in spring of 2020, that was a fear-inducing possibility.

New data from the Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (PDF), among others, show that these fears ultimately did not materialize. Several temporary emergency “safety-net” provisions enacted in 2020 built upon the Affordable Care Act to keep the number of insured people stable. Untangling which were most responsible for this steady state, amid extreme job losses, will help policymakers determine how to proceed as the pandemic continues.

To test the effects of various health policies enacted in 2020 and 2021, we used a modeling tool developed at RAND to apply the changes in a stepwise fashion to real-world data on certain populations. Our analysis focused on the state of New York, which the pandemic hit hard: The unemployment rate jumped to 14.5 percent in April of 2020, up from 4 percent a year earlier. We used industry-level unemployment data from the state to estimate which workers lost their jobs, and we linked this information to data on income and family characteristics to estimate how many of those people may have become eligible for alternative sources of coverage via the ACA or temporary safety-net policies.

Read the full article about the healthcare gap by Christine Eibner and Jodi L. Liu at RAND Corporation.