Losing Your Health Care to COVID-19: The pandemic has forced workers off of employer-sponsored plans and into the unknown.

• Author: Johnson, Sharon

FOR MORE THAN FORTY -FIVE MARS. Shirley Smith has been a dedieated member of the workforce. A can-do woman, she helped customers select furniture and trained legions of salespeople at Art Van in Taylor, Michigan. Steady paychecks enabled her to support her son, buy a home, and manage her diabetes.

But in March, Smith's world collapsed when the retailer, where she had worked for twenty-three years, announced that it was going out of business.

"I was frantic," recalls Smith in a phone interview. "Jobs aren't easy to come by in the Detroit area, which has battled unemployment for decades. But the worst blow was the imminent loss of health insurance."

Like many people with diabetes, sixty-year-old Smith depends on insulin and other medications to prevent heart attacks, strokes, and kidney failure. Diabetes ravages eyes and limbs, so she requires regular check-ups with physicians.

"Art Van had an outstanding medical plan that covered my medications, one of which costs $1,500 for thirty pills," she says. "As a result, my out-of-pocket costs for medical care totaled only $80 to $90 a month."

Smith realized that she might die without her medications, so she called her physician, who provided some free samples. Her cataract surgery was postponed because Smith feared that the cost of the operation and follow-up care would sink her budget.

"Last spring was an agonizing time," Smith says. "My medical expenses soared because I had to spend $900 a month on medications."

In June, Smith landed a new job as a sales manager at another company. Its health insurance plan is not as good as what she had at Art Van, but, she says, "I'm more fortunate than many of my former co-workers."

United for Respect, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that advocates for economic justice for retail workers, has rallied to the support of the 3,100 employees of Art Van. Its September 28 letter urged Thomas H. Lee Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm which took over Art Van in 2017, to give former employees $1,500 each to cover three months of out-of-pocket insurance so they could weather the COVID-19 pandemic. The letter argued that the $400 per worker payments provided by the company's hardship fund were woefully inadequate. "[F]ormer employees are facing astronomical hospital bills, unable to afford prescriptions, surviving a pandemic as immune-compromised, and recovering from contracting COVID, among many other circumstances," the letter stated. A...