Employment

This brief highlights low-income workers and the impact of ACA coverage expansions on this population. Low-income workers may not have access to jobs that provide full-time, full-year employment or jobs with comprehensive benefit packages, including health insurance. Medicaid plays an important role in providing health coverage for low-income workers, and coverage expansions implemented under the ACA have produced substantial coverage gains for low-income workers and a corresponding reduction in the uninsured. However, low-income workers in non-expansion states with incomes too high for Medicaid but too low for subsidies in the Marketplace do not have an affordable coverage option and will likely remain uninsured.

This brief highlights voices from adult focus group participants with low and moderate incomes who gained Medicaid or Marketplace coverage following implementation of the ACA. It focuses on work, including work status, the new labor market, job benefits, and the role of ACA coverage for those with non-traditional jobs.

Multiple studies find that the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion has increased coverage, with enrollment exceeding expectations in some states, while producing budget savings for states and reductions in uncompensated care costs for hospitals, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation review of 61 studies and policy reports. The literature review provides…

This brief was prepared with the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York. It is designed to provide some insight into the underlying economic and fiscal conditions in expansion and non-expansion states leading up to 2014 by looking at the typical (i.e. median) state for each group. This analysis will provide a framework against which to measure the impact of expansion decisions going forward. The sections focus on: demographics, tax capacity and revenue, state budgets and employment.

As additional states consider whether to implement the ACA Medicaid expansion, some have raised pursuing waiver authority to tie Medicaid eligibility for adults under the expansion to work requirements. This fact sheet profiles uninsured adults who could gain Medicaid coverage under the ACA by their relationship to the workforce and job-based coverage.

Most Americans in prime working age who aren’t currently employed hope to return to work in the future, though family responsibilities, health issues and a lack of good jobs pose significant challenges, finds a new survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, The New York Times and CBS News. Rather than…

To help shed light on recent trends in the U.S. employment market, the Kaiser Family Foundation partnered with the New York Times and CBS News to conduct a survey of adults between the ages of 25-54 (generally considered to be prime working age) who are not currently employed. Rather than focusing only on those who meet the official government definition of unemployment, this survey takes a broad look at all prime-age adults who are not working, regardless of their desire for work or job-seeking activities. While the official U.S. unemployment rate has declined since the start of the recession in late 2007, the total share of adults who are not employed has risen in recent years. This survey examines the views and experiences of this broad group of prime-age workers who are not employed, including how they get by financially, the factors to which they attribute their lack of employment, what it would take to get them working, and – for those who used to work – how being out of work has changed their lives.

In a new brief, KFF analysts explain and summarize the recent history of efforts to make work requirements a condition of eligibility for Medicaid in some states. Following years of administrative, political, and legal activity across two presidential administrations, recent Supreme Court action and skepticism about work requirements by the…

KHN’s Céline Gounder and KFF’s Mollyann Brodie look at the challenges in returning to normal life after the COVID-19 pandemic when many Americans, particularly people of color and workers with low incomes, do not have paid sick leave.

The surge in COVID-19 cases triggered by the omicron variant led to widespread work disruptions, with about 4 in 10 workers (42%) – including 6 in 10 of those with lower incomes – saying they had to miss work at least once in the past three months because of a…