Unemployed, But Not Uninsured
How Obama's health-care plan affects the 15 million Americans who are still out of work.
Say what you will about the politics surrounding health-care reform, but the new legislation undoubtedly will boost the quality of life for the unemployed and the underemployed. In the midst of the Great Recession, that's a lot of folks: roughly 15 million Americans. "Those are precisely the type of people helped by this bill," says Linda Blumberg, a health-policy expert at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social think tank in Washington, D.C. NEWSWEEK'S Nancy Cook recently spoke with Blumberg about the specifics of the bill and what it means for the jobless, the self-employed, and small-business owners. Excerpts:
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Nancy Cook is a staff writer for Newsweek and Newsweek.com, covering business and economics. In 2010, she and a team of two editors won the New York Press Club Award for Best Business Reporting on the Internet for their seven-month multimedia project called “Jobbed: How America Works Now,” which examined the future of work, careers and the labor market as the country emerged from the recession.
Cook has written about the way the stimulus money affected a single neighborhood to luxury retailers thrilled by record Wall Street bonuses to accounts of rank-and-file employees whose careers were turned upside down by Lehman Brothers’ collapse. She also has reported on politics and economic policy for Newsweek.com’s national affairs blog, focusing on the intersection between Washington D.C. and Wall Street.
Prior to coming to Newsweek, she worked as a producer on the 2008 presidential campaign at National Public Radio and as an on-air reporter for WRNI, the Rhode Island NPR affiliate. There, her enterprise and feature reporting on a lackluster urban school system and a federal lawsuit against the state child welfare agency earned her two regional Associated Press awards. She graduated from Carleton College and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she now teaches as an adjunct professor.
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