Penn Today: Who Wants Government Health Care and Unemployment Programs To Expand?

From Penn Today:  For many Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic was both frightening and financially devastating. Along with unrelenting worries about getting severely ill or dying from the virus—or inadvertently infecting others—millions of people lost their jobs and struggled to pay their rent, mortgage, and credit card bills. The federal government responded by providing vaccines along with more affordable and accessible health care, increased food and housing assistance, money for families with children, funds for small businesses and hospitals, and higher unemployment payments. How did individual experiences with COVID-19 affect Americans’ feelings about the federal safety net? Senior Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics fellow Alex Rees-Jones wanted to find out. “The ideal use of safety-net policy is to provide us protections against unpredictable personal or economic shocks that are outside of our control,” Rees-Jones says. “Workers losing their jobs during the initial COVID-19 shut-downs are as perfect an example of that as I’ve ever seen.” In a study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Rees-Jones and colleagues showed that Americans who felt more severely impacted in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—either objectively or subjectively—felt more positive about expansions to government health care and unemployment insurance. The influence of the COVID-19 safety net on policy preferences may have already affected American politics by “contributing to the finding that county-level infection and death counts predicted a loss of vote-share for incumbent President Trump in the 2020 presidential election.” These changes in policy preferences may continue to affect Americans long after the pandemic subsides. Read more at Penn Today.