COVID pandemic shows Alabama should expand Medicaid, study says

Alabama Unemployment lineq

Hundreds of people sat for hours Wednesday outside Alabama State University's Oliver-Dunn Acadome in Montgomery in hopes of resolving issues that have caused them to be denied unemployment benefits. (Connor Sheets | csheets@al.com)

A new report from an Alabama public policy organization says the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed barriers to opportunity for the state’s workers, and recommends ways to reverse the damage.

Alabama Arise on Monday put out a report, “The State of Working Alabama 2021,” which suggests lawmakers expand Medicaid and guarantee paid sick leave, as well as improve the state’s unemployment insurance system, among other recommendations.

Alabama Arise Executive Director Robyn Hyden said the report gives Alabama’s legislators a blueprint on how to fix persistent problems handcuffing workers.

“Legislators spent the first two weeks of this session protecting the interests of corporations,” Hyden said. “They should spend the rest of the session protecting the interests of the people of Alabama.”

Jim Carnes, policy director for Alabama Arise, said many of the remedies the report recommends are not new ones for Alabama Arise.

“We’ve been making the case for years that Alabama was creating and tolerating deficits and gaps in our policy framework that were harming ordinary people in the best of times,” he said. “Now we’ve entered a stress test like we’ve never seen before, and we’ve learned that those weaknesses are indeed worse in a crisis situation and the people who were already suffering from policy inequities have it even worse in the current environment.”

The report spans healthcare, hunger, housing, pay and the fate of front-line workers, painting a picture of how the effects of pandemic measures fell more harshly on low-income and minority Alabamians.

For example, the report suggests that Alabama modernize the way it processes unemployment claims, an issue that boiled over in 2020 when furloughed and laid-off workers flooded the system, sometimes waiting months for even a response.

This came after state lawmakers, in 2019 at a time of record employment, cut in half the time people can receive unemployment compensation. And while Alabama has regained many of the jobs lost by the coronavirus lockdown, the state’s Black Belt communities are still lagging behind, the report noted.

The pandemic has also understandably focused attention on healthcare and Alabamians’ access to it. According to the report, 62.2% of Alabama’s white workers had health insurance through their jobs. The same was true for only 46.4% of Black workers and 35.5% of Hispanic/Latinx workers. Early in the COVID-19 shutdown, Hispanic/Latinx Alabamians reported lack of insurance at nearly three times the rate of white residents, the report says.

These and other statistics are among the reasons why the report recommends:

  • Rolling back cuts to unemployment benefits made in 2019 and creating a modernized claims system.
  • Expanding Medicaid for more than 300,000 Alabamians with low incomes.
  • Guaranteed permanent paid sick leave.
  • Providing state support for the Alabama Housing Trust Fund, which was created in 2012 to collect and distribute funds to support affordable housing for those with incomes at or below 60 percent of their area’s median family income.
  • Expanding high-speed, affordable broadband technology to rural and low-income communities, something that economic developers say would not only improve education access and ability to work remotely, but speed economic activity.

“The crisis we’re in offers us an opportunity to make some hard decisions about what we’re willing to live with going forward,” Carnes said. “It’s also an opportunity for us to use this experience as a springboard for recovery.”

You can read the report here.

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