OPINION: Being out of work isn’t bad just for your finances: It’s bad for your health, Jennie E. Brand and Sarah A. Burgard write. Losing a job can mean decades of health problems, which is a good enough reason to prevent layoffs.
Being out of work isn’t bad just for your finances: It’s bad for your health. Losing a job can cause depression, anxiety and other mental-health problems. Research also consistently shows that job loss and unemployment—even just for a few months—are associated with poorer physical health as well, including increased risks for cardiovascular disease, hospitalization and death. These risks can endure for years or even decades after a person returns to work.
The health impacts of job loss It’s not hard to see why losing a job, followed by a period of unemployment, can be bad for a person’s health. The initial months following a job loss can reduce social support by straining people’s finances and psychological well-being and limiting their social interactions. People who lose their health insurance along with their job may not seek medical attention when illness arises.
Why pandemic-driven job loss may be the next health crisis While some of the data on which we base our concern come from other economic recessions and downturns, such as the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009, we expect that there could be even worse outcomes in the wake of COVID-19. The peak unemployment rate during the Great Recession was 10%, while the peak unemployment rate in 2020 was almost 15%.
This suggests the need for more robust support for people who are out of work, including continued health insurance coverage, to help buffer the economic toll of job loss and thereby mitigate some of its health consequences. The U.S. has some threads of a social safety net, such as up to 26 weeks of unemployment benefits in most states, and Congress created extra pandemic help when it passed the CARES Act in 2020.
Jennie E. Brand is professor of sociology and statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sarah A. Burgard is professor of sociology a the University of Michigan.
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