We explore airline mergers and regulation with Bloomberg Opinion's Brooke Sutherland. We also talk about the shortage of nurses and the concern in the UK over doctors. Editor Rachel Rosenthal and columnist Therese Raphael join for those discussions. We also talk about unemployment insurance with Bloomberg's Kathryn Edwards. Amy Morris hosts.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast count US Saturdays at one in seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. This week we'll look at the medical profession and why so many people are leaving. First, we take a look at the US nursing shortage and how an untapped resource could help relieve some pressure within the nursing industry. Then we'll shift to the doctor shortage in the UK. Why they're leaving the profession or at least leaving the country to practice elsewhere. Why is it so hard to be a doctor in the United Kingdom? Speaking of leaving your profession, we'll also look at the promise or the threat of AI and how unemployment insurance needs a huge do over if it's going to be prepared for the potential upcoming labor market disruption. But first, let's let's begin with the airline industry and consolidation deals gone unchecked for too long. Attorney General Merrick Garland himself spoke to the proposed merger between Spirit and Jet Blue.
Our complaint alleges that Jet blues proposed three point eight billion dollar acquisition of Spirit violate Section seven of the Clayton Act. We allege that, if allowed to proceed, this merger will limit choices and drive up ticket prices for passengers across the country.
Meanwhile, a judge has since ruled in favor of the Justice Department's efforts to unwind a deal between Jet Blue and American allowing the airlines to book each other's flights and link their reward programs, saying that it removed the incentive to be competitive and could lead to higher fares. But is this too little, too late? Brook Sutherland is a Bloomberg opinion columnist covering deals and industrial companies, and she joins us now, Brook, it is a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today. First, let's just get down to the heat of the meat. How disciplined is airline antitrust scrutiny in the US?
Well, historically not very disciplined. You know, there were a number of large murders in the industry, many of which were driven by bankruptcies. To be fair, and the thinking was, you know that by combining the airlines that you could strengthen the overall infrastructure, which was not a bad thought, but you did have a series of deals that led to a very highly consolidated industry. And the most recent large deal that happened was the combination of US Airways and the parent company of American Airlines AMR, which was bankrupt, and the Justice Department put up a bit of a fight of over that deal in twenty thirteen, but ultimately settled and allowed the transaction to proceed. Now we're seeing a very different stance, particularly from the Biden administration on antitrust overall, but particularly as it relates to airlines. And so JetBlue is really at the center of the latest push, and we'reing they had a marketing alliance with American Airlines that the Trump administration's Transportation Department actually allowed to proceed, but the Biden administration's Justice Department later came in ensued and said, actually the steal is anti competitive. A judge just ruled in the favor of the Justice Department. But Jet Blew is simultaneously also trying to buy Spirit Airlines, which the Justice Department is also taking issue with.
Okay, so why now Why are they starting to pay attention now? Is it strictly who's in the White House or who has the majority on Capitol Hill? Is it all political or is there something more to it.
I think that's part of it. I think it's also worth remembering the very extreme measures that the government went to to support the airline industry during the pandemic. The airlines got a lot of special dispensation that other industries that were hard hit by COVID did not get, and specifically in terms of payroll support, but also you know, there were loans made available to the airlines and also to the airspace manufacturers, although that industry didn't take the funds. And I think there's some expectation that, you know, the degree to which the tax payer propped up airline infrastructure, we would like to see a little bit better service. We would like to see this industry focus more on how it actually serves the customer. And I think that's raised some questions about airline habits that we've all long griped about but just sort of accepted as the status closed, things like families not being seated together, change fees, and you know, I think that's really focused a lot of attention on the airline industry's practices.
That's what I wanted to get into when you were talking about where the focus should be. Are these the types of deals they need to be focusing on the Jet Blue and Spirit merger.
I mean, it's it's difficult to sit here with the benefit of twenty twenty hindsight. But you know, the reason why that Jet Blue was pursuing this alliance with American Airlines and the takeover Spirit Airlines is that it feels like not just the airline industry, but the overall aerospace sector is so consolidated that the only way that it can really compete is by doing these transactions. And what I mean by that is that, you know, it struggles to compete with the likes of Delta and United, which you know, have a lot of airplanes, have a lot of market share, but it also can't get the plane that it wants to grow because we have very deep rooted supply chain issues in the aerospace manufacturing industry, which by the way, is also very consolidated, where we have a duopoly essentially for large aircraft, basically a duopoly for airplane engines. You know, we now have two major aircraft lessers. I think that the overall system is maybe the root of the problem, not just these specific deals, but the anti trust regulators are doing what they can to chip away what they see as an overly consolidated sector.
So what will this mean then for future deals? Is this new found attention going to put a damper on those?
I think, in my opinion, this Jet Blue takeover Spirit was sort of the last possible deal that could be done. And if you remember, there's actually a fight over this asset. Spirit originally had a deal with Frontier that would have combined the two ultra low cost airlines, and then Jet Blue came in and tried to buy Spirit and ultimately won the right to do so. But you know, I don't know what other major consolidation could happen antitrust being one big reason for that, and also just sheer scale of the bigger players that are involved here. And so this was really sort of the last big deal, and I think that's why you're seeing Jet Blue compete so aggressively for it.
I wondered about the engine makers and the manufacturers and how this all extended beyond the airlines and to the customer. As you said, summer is here. Everybody is chomping at the bit to get out of the house and to travel. I mean, what's the like.
You know, the airlines are trying really hard to invest in resilience, and they have repeatedly actually dialed back their capacity plans over the course of last year as it became clear that they were just did not have the resources that they needed to meet all this demand. But also this year they're really trying to be more disciplined, and that means offering fewer seats. Of course, the flip side of that for the consumer is that when there's fewer seats to be had, you end up paying more for the right to fly on a plane. But the airlines are doing what they can. I just think that it's a system issue as well, and we're not really seeing any kind of breakthrough in the logjam on the air States supply side. And you know, these airlines would like to get more planes, they would like to fly more and really capitalize on this demand, and you just really can't. And one interesting side effect of that has been that it's actually completely jammed up the business model of the low cost carriers. You think of that as you know, typically being a business model built on nickel and diming customers, but it's also built on growth, and the way that it works is that they outgrow the increase in their cost. Well, you can't do that if you can't get airplanes. And there's also a shortage of pilots, and you have the big airlines competing very aggressively to hire those pilots and willing to pay what they need to to attract that talent. And so, you know, I hope that it's better than last year in terms of the travel experience, but I am nervous that it won't be.
I'm really curious where this may wind up, what the endgame is, because I understand that consolidation may be seen as the boogeyman at this point, even though the consolidation has been going on for so long. Just basically from what you've educated me with, it looks like it's been going on for so long that stopping one small deal here or one medium sized deal there is not really the answer what can be done at this point.
I mean, I think that's sort of the issue, is that you know, you can't really go back and do all of these other deals at this point. I mean, it would be a complete mess to try to unravel the degree of consolidation that's taken place up and down this supply chain. And so I think the argument from the side of the anti trust regulators is, well, you have to start somewhere. But I think to your point, as an airline consumer, I don't know that this is necessarily going to change what you experience when you go to the airport, And you know, I think it sort of begs deeper questions of just what exactly anti trust regulators want to be. You know, I think it's very interesting that in another highly consolidated industry, the railroad industry, we had a big deal that did get approved. Now it's a separate regulator that is independent from the Justice Department and the Biden administration, but they decided that because that industry is so consolidated, the only way to allow new competition is by letting these smallest players combine. Well, that's exactly the argument that JetBlue is making here that for them to be able to really take on the big airl lines and introduce new routes offer customers better options that are pricing, they need more scale. So it's an argument that's resonating in one camp of the regulatory regime and not in another.
Is there any red flag or any milestone that you are looking for in the next quarter, Perhaps that may be coming up. That's happening with the airline industry.
I think we're going to be looking to see what American Airlines and Jet Blue do with this decision they're ruling by the district judge against their alliance. They do have an opportunity to appeal, and it will be interesting to see if they take that. It's worth noting that this partnership has been in existence for basically two years now, so it is not an insignificant task to try to unravel this, and they have invested a lot in setting this up. And then the next thing to watch is what happens, you know, as far as the Justice departments challenge to the Jet Blue Spirit deal.
All right, Brooke, thank you so much for taking the time with us. We appreciate it. Brooks Sutherland is a Bloomberg opinion columnist covering deals and industrial companies, and coming up, we'll look at the nursing shortage the US and one idea that just might help. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast. Catch us Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris, and we're taking a look at two pressing issues for the United States and how they might be able to connect for the greater good. The US nursing workforce is losing good workers. One hundred thousand workers have quit or retired during the pandemic. Another eight hundred thousand have signaled an intent to leave within the next four years. But there is a pool of healthcare workers that remains untapped. Immigrants. New York Governor Kathy Hochel is calling on the federal government to expedite work visas forms awaiting asylum cases to be processed. They're eager to work, they want to work.
They came here in search of work and a new future, and.
They can become part of our economy and part of our communities.
New York Governor Kathy Hokel. Now, let's get more details on this from Bloomberg opinion editor Rachel Rosenthal. She is also a member of the editorial board covering healthcare. Rachel, it's a pleasure. Thank you for taking the time with me today, and let's talk about those numbers. One hundred thousand leaving the profession, another eight hundred thousand talking about Yeah, I'm probably gonna leave too. Give us some perspective about what that means and what would that illustrate to you.
You know, I think this has been an ongoing issue for decades. The nursing workforce has been in a shortage really since the beginning of time. You know, it's this is one of the few professions that the Labor Department has signaled that is in a perpetual shortage, and that hasn't changed. So what we're seeing right now is sort of the confluence of lots of factors. You know, we had the pandemic, and then we had several rounds of flu and RSV, and you know, while the rest of the world moved on, the healthcare workforce was left to pick up the pieces, and so they're still living in a workforce and a reality that's been hollowed out by the pandemic. So a lot of what we saw during the pandemic is a lot of older workers quit or retired early, fearful of getting sick. They have not come back yet in mass numbers, you know. And then we're also seeing on the other end, younger workers getting you know, really stressed by the new and onerous working conditions, you know, ratios of patients that they are not equipped to handle. So they're just fleeing the nursing the nursing workforce, and so what we're seeing is increased demand for services and a workforce that isn't really equipped to handle it.
What is the history of immigrants within the US healthcare system? You write about this in your column on the Bloomberg terminal, and it's a connection that I had never made before.
There's a long history of immigrants coming into the US, starting back actually in the early twentieth century, even before the US had a very strong relationship with the Philippines, after you know, the Spanish American War, and you know, I think there was this what ended up happening was US you know, military who was in the Philippines were they were developing these nursing schools, and so a lot of Filipino nurses would be sent to the US for training, and it sort of snowballed from there. The first nursing visa is actually in nineteen fifty two, and then it has evolved since. But what I think has happened is instead of having a specific visa for healthcare workers, there's been union objections to and various other hurdles to having it just a healthcare specific visa. So what ended up happening was healthcare workers are reliant on the overall employment based immigration category and so they're kind of, you know, in there alongside other folks who are in the backlog. And what we found is that, you know, the majority of the immigrants who end up having ability to work in the US are recipients of green cards as opposed to work visas.
Yeah, I want to dig into that a little bit more because you talk about it in depth in your column how the green card system is impacting this and it's not always in a good way.
Right. So there's a top of one hundred and forty thousand employment based green cards, and that has been unchanged since nineteen ninety. Obviously, the workforce has grown since then, our healthcare needs have changed since since then, so there's a reasonable argument to raise that number now, as we know immigrationses on immigration, we've gotten close several occasions in the past decades, but it's been extraordinarily difficult, and there are folks who raise legitimate concerns about how an influx of immigrants can affect wages and working conditions. But I think what's needed is a more flexible number that can reflect our demands.
Part of the equation is the health of the American people. We are older, we are fatter, We are simply not as healthy as we could be or should be. We need more nurses, and that doesn't really even factor in COVID. We were just talking earlier this week about the aging population. The number of people over the age of sixty five has skyrocketed in the past ten years, and the nurses are not there for them.
Yeah, I think you know it's immigration is not the only answer, you know. One of the astonishing things that I found throughout my research, and I've written on this previously, are just the fact that you have folks who want to go to nursing school and become nurses, and yet nursing schools are not equipped to handle that demand. So they don't have the faculty, they don't have the clinical training sites, and so about ninety thousand qualified applications are turned away each year. So we've got domestic problems as well. What I think where I think immigrants can fit in is, you know, if they have they're already trained, they have foreign qualifications. I'm not saying they could you know, necessarily be ready to go on day one, but theoretically, you know, if they recredential take the appropriate licensing exams, they should be qualified to work in the US. So those are folks who might be outside the US right now. There are also a lot of folks who've come to the US or already here from you know, from existing Green card, family based and are just working below their potential. Maybe they're working as an assistant or a made or even in domestic help and they were a nurse previously, and they just they are not in the workforce right now because they haven't maybe there's a language barrier, and they haven't been able to take the appropriate licensing exams. So there are there's a whole the nursing workforce. There's a really big range for you know, of skill levels that are needed. And so I think there's folks who are on the sidelines who could probably step in if they have the appropriate, expedited pathways to recredential and to get into the US workforce.
Other than having to jump through hoops of fire to get into the healthcare workforce, which would apply to many people across the board. Did you find in your research that there is a resistance specifically to skilled foreign workers in the US.
I think there's always a degree of anxiety about foreign workers. I think, you know, there's you know, cultural barriers, there's some degree of xenophobia in certain pockets, and there are legitimate concerns about how that effect you know, when you increase the supply of workers, what does that impact have on wages? However, I think in this case, we really need bodies in the workforce. And you know, what we saw during COVID was, you know, hospitals that were desperate for workers were turning to contract nurses who are just exorbitantly expensive, you know, and a huge proportion of hospitals costs were going to labor. They always have, but it's just skyrocket and now some hospitals could afford it, a lot of hospitals couldn't. And so what was ended up happening is you had this really vicious cycle where folks were leaving, so you know, these hospitals became more reliant on this more expensive pool of labor, and like the dynamics just got really out of wack. I think for the more stable salaried workforce, it was very destabilizing.
So bottom line, immigration reform could theoretically help alleviate the nursing crisis. In addition to finding ways to streamline to allow people to get into nursing school people who do want.
To contribute, there needs to be fixes on the domestic side. There need to be fixes to immigration policy. These things together can help restore a workforce that has been hollowed out by the pandemic.
Bloomberg Opinion editor Rachel Rosenthal also covers healthcare and speaking of healthcare, why the UK may be a terrible place to be a doctor. We'll talk about that just ahead. But don't forget. We're also available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. This is Bloomberg Opinion.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast. Catch us Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com. The iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business app, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Bloomberg Opinion, I may Mee Morris. The UK is exp eperiencing a physician shortage. While the whole world is going through something of a healthcare crunch. We're all aging and there is increased demand. The UK is experiencing something even more intense. We welcome Terrees. Ralphael Therees is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering healthcare and British politics, and she's going to bring us up to speed on some of these issues. Let's just start with the doctor shortage in the UK. How does that compare to things that we've seen here in the US, like the shortage of nurses or the worldwide crunch in healthcare.
Yeah, so you're absolutely right to draw comparisons, because there are shortages of doctors, particularly general practitioners in most advanced countries right now, in the US, France and Germany, even the Nordic countries, and that's part of a even broader shortage in healthcare generally. The UK, as I wrote in this piece, has got all of those problems on steroids because the National Health Service is a taxpayer funded service, free at the point of delivery, so all healthcare that isn't private, which is a growing share, but let's set that aside goes through the NHS, and they're around one hundred and twenty four thousand healthcare vacancies in England. Lots and lots of nursing radiographers, but at least nine thousand of these are doctors, and that probably understates the problem. So we know that by twenty thirty and estimated one in four GP posts are are going to be vacant. And there are a number of reasons for that that you know. One of them is the doctor workforce is aging. But I think the real crisis for the NHS is not just an aging workforce. So they can't train enough doctors, they can't recruit enough doctors, and many who are in the workforce are retiring or leaving early, or cutting back their hours or move took places like sunny Australia where they make more money.
In your column on the Bloomberg Terminal, you explain how there are several factors you just itemized a few things just in that answer there that have impacted this and it's all seeming to happen all at once. What's the impact here? What are you seeing.
Coming out of COVID. What we saw with the NHS was a massive backlag of cases, so everything from cancer screenings to hip replacements. That backlog is now seven point four million procedures. So it's just enormous. People are having to wait very long periods of time before they get treated. That's put a lot of pressure on doctors. We've seen burnout rates sore. But doctors and medical staff have already been through the COVID period, which was enormously stressful. They're already dealing with great staff shortages, and so what's happening is you're having all of those pressures from COVID now compounding with workforce shortages, and then on top of that, there are really serious retention issues to do with pay, to do with work conditions. And one of the things I focus on my piece is how that has filtered through to the situation for junior doctors. And these are doctors who qualify it's sort of in the first eight years eight nine years of qualification. They're a huge part of the workforce, or nearly half of all hospital doctors and their pay and conditions are really among you know, the most problematic, and so a lot of them are just leaving or they're not specializing. So you know, these are all building up to a whole set of pressures on the healthcare system. But really, what doctors tell me is that it is just a miserable time to be a doctor in Britain. I mean, you know, you can exempt some of the very senior doctors who's who have a lot of you know, flexibility and have accumulated income over the years, but for these young doctors, it's pretty tough.
Was this a problem before COVID and the before time times? Was this starting to simmer to the surface and become an issue. Was it exacerbated by COVID?
It was definitely exacerbated by COVID. I think one of the reasons that's the case is because the way the training system works in Britain, the senior doctors provide clinical training for junior doctors. So when they're in medical school. The medical school in Britain you do right out of high school, so you have five or six years of medical training and some of that is in hospital and clinical environments, and the senior doctors do the training. And because of the pressures of COVID, the backlog from COVID and the general workforce shortages, these senior doctors don't have the time, they don't have the energy, they're out of bandwidth to do the training. So the junior doctors are telling me, we go into the hospitals, we have nobody to learn from. The senior surgeons are too busy or they don't have time, and people have left, and the doctors say, we can't pass on the knowledge the junior doctors. Some of them are leaving, some of them are not choosing to specialize. So the system itself, which is relied on this community of older and younger workers working together, is breaking down. And that's that's what It's a deeply structural problem, and they're just no easy fixes, particularly with so many junior doctors going to places like Australia or New Zealand.
And we are talking with Bloomberg Opinion columnists Terrees Raphael about why UK's doctors shortage has reached such a critical stage. You've mentioned a couple of times the doctors going not just to different neighborhoods, not just to different areas, but to entirely different countries. How are other countries taking note of this and responding?
I think the medical workforce is going to be an increasingly global workforce and provided that regulations allow for doctors to move. So in the US it's quite hard for British doctor to move to the US to take certain exams, I guess. But Australia makes it very easy. They are recruiting aggressively. There are recruitment companies based in London that facilitate these transfers. They make it easier, they pay more, the conditions are better, there's more flexibility, the weather's nicer, let's base it. That is, I think puts an added pressure on the UK to say, what you know, it's not just a recruitment issue. They can't. They're expanding the medical school places a bit, but their limits to what they.
Can do there.
They're bringing in foreign doctors, huge numbers of foreign doctors, mainly from Southeast Asia, from Africa, but even that is not plugging the whole, but losing doctors to Australia and New Zealand. Some go to Canada summer into Europe, but mainly it's English speaking countries that allow them to transfer their qualifications easily and you know, provide better paying conditions.
Could we see a time when there is such a critical doctor shortage that it would make even routine appointments near impossible.
I mean, I think we're already seeing that in the UK. People who can afford private insurance tend to get it through their companies or or you know, with their savings. We're hearing increasingly and I senior doctors I've spoken to have said, you know, they're they're moving more to private practice, or some of them are cutting their NHS hours, which means less availability. So we're getting a two tier system. Still, the private sector is still much much smaller than the NHS, but it's growing. The NHS is having to itself rely on private providers for certain services, so I think they will have to find some structural changes. It will come with retaining the doctors they have. That is an absolute must, but there's not a lot of money in the exchequer. We're seeing Britain now being projected to potentially go into recession. So these are problems where one thing cascades into another and the solutions are not you know, there aren't quick fixes. They will probably need to some of the structural issues. But yes, it's already having an impact. It's hard to get doctor's appointments in Britain.
Yeah, I wanted to ask what the answer would be in what the government's role would be, but it sounds like no matter what that is, this isn't something that's going to be fixed in months or even just a year or so.
Now.
I mean, there are some things they could do in quite short order that would make a difference. So the flexibility that the pay structures are quite rigid. They could improve the flexibility on pay. Could they could improve how these doctors are paid. These junior doctors are paid very little. They come out with enormous debt and it's a long period of time before they can really ramp up their income. They can make work conditions, you know, junior doctors telling me they have to pay for their scrubs, they have to pay to access the doctor's mess, they have to pay for parking. They don't have visibility on their schedules, so they don't know how much money they can afford to pay and rent. These things are you know, they're small things that add up and create stresses in their li and I think they can. It almost needs a private sector style corporate HR approach that says, we care about our workforce, we want them to be effective. What can we do to make their lives a little bit easier and that would help on the margins. And then they're bigger issues that need to be addressed to do with just the sustainability of the funding structure and what the NHS is.
But yeah, tires, we're going to continue to follow this with you. Thank you so much for taking the time with us.
Appreciate it great to speak to you. Amy.
Bloomberg Opinion columnists Terrees Raphael covering healthcare and British politics. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. We've talked a lot here at Bloomberg about AI and its impact on industries across the board. It threatens or promises, depending on your point of view, to disrupt and transform the labor market from law firms to newsrooms, and that means unemployment insurance may also have to be refashioned. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Katherine Edwards joins us, Historically we have seen disrupts in the labor market before, has unemployment insurance been able to keep up.
With this now, and honestly it started behind. Unemployment insurance was enacted on the federal level in nineteen thirty five, and by enacting on the federal level, I mean the federal government required states to create their own program, which is why we have this confederation of fifty three separate state and territory programs today. The first unemployment insurance program was enacted in Wisconsin in nineteen thirty two, but it was based on designs from the nineteen twenties, and what the designers decided was that the best way to prevent layoff and unemployment was to tax it. You make unemployment more expensive, and then employers are discouraged from sending people into unemployment and having quick layoffs. And so they created an experience rated tax where every time an employer lays someone off and that person claims unemployment, their tax goes up. This was meant to serve as a disincentive. They designed it off of workers compensation, where if a worker gets injured on the job, goes up, and this would make you prevent workers being injured and be more safe. And so they kind of took that logic of workers compensation, picked it up and applied it to unemployment. It didn't fit then, It certainly doesn't fit now.
The way you're describing in it sounds like it has been historically this entire time, a reaction to what has already happened, and how do we plug the holes.
It's never evolved to take into account almost anything we know about unemployment, even then, but particularly now, the nature of unemployment, the length of spells, the idea that a career could end, not that you could lose a job, but that you could lose a career as the market advances. It was never designed to think about these things, and it was never changed to take them into account. I mean, automation that has affected men has affected blue collar workers in manufacturing. Automation that has affected women has affected white collar workers in the office setting. Right, computers used to be women typists, Those were women. That type of automation it hasn't been even in terms of white collar blue collar, and it hasn't been even in terms of gender. And the labor market is cyclical, and so it's always going to be there's some new arrival, some new shock, where there's this new flavor of whatever tomorrow's recession or risk will bring. That's kind of the whole point of what's wrong with unemployment insurance is that not only has it not evolved, it doesn't really think about unemployment as something that cyclically arrives.
Let's get to the bottom line of what your column was talking about then, because you were talking about some potential solutions. You mentioned triage and flexibility in how to engage that. Explain what you mean by that.
I could describe unemployment insurance as one size fits all, but it's really one size fits few to none. Huh. If you are awarded unemployment insurance, it's a temporary benefit. It lasts a fixed number of weeks at a fixed dollar amount. Pandemic interruptions are very special changes to the program that all expired aside. But what we know about unemployment is that it is just really different based on who loses their job and how they lose their job. Right, someone who loses their job at twenty five and fifty five will have remarkably different unemployment experiences, and we know this ahead of time. Just like someone who loses their job when the unemployment rate is below four versus above ten will have really different labor market experiences. Unemployment insurance doesn't really take any of that into account. The idea for kind of how to approach this in the future is to build more flexibility into the program so that the benefit is more efficient and that it's tailored to the worker in the situation.
Is this anywhere on anybody's radar at all?
Well, unemployment insurance hasn't been reformed since nineteen thirty five, and it hasn't even really been maintained since the mid seventies. We only care about unemployment when the labor market is bad, So it's hard to say where momentum and policy interest would look like for unemployment because it's typically none.
Catherwin Edwards is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a labor economist to end, an independent policy consultant, and that does it for this week's Bloomberg Opinion. We are produced by Eric Bolow, and you can find all of these columns on the Bloomberg Terminal. We're available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up. I maybe Morris, this is Bloomberg