What happens when we lose healthcare coverage
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Massive Medicaid cuts, including new work requirements, are rolling out across the country. Trouble filing paperwork will be one reason qualifying Americans lose their coverage. In this episode, what history tells us about cutting Medicaid funding. Plus: Personal incomes are falling, consumers are prioritizing value over luxury, and we explain incoming Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s preferred inflation measure.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On the program today, what really is in a word? |
| 0:07.7 | From American public media, this is Marketplace. |
| 0:16.4 | In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdell. It is Tuesday. Today, this one is the second of June. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. What I'm about to say is, perhaps, self-evident, but bear with me here for a second, would you? Words have meaning. |
| 0:38.2 | I know, basic, but important. |
| 0:41.0 | Our words of choice today are wages and income. |
| 0:46.8 | As we were saying yesterday, we're going to get an update on worker wages on Friday when the May unemployment report lands. |
| 0:52.9 | But as Marketplace's Justin Ho reports today to get us |
| 0:55.5 | going, economists and analysts are keeping an eye on incomes, too. |
| 1:00.9 | Every month, the Bureau of Economic Analysis offers up a few different ways to measure people's income. |
| 1:06.0 | There's total personal income. There's income after taxes. But neither of those gives us a clear picture of what's |
| 1:12.0 | going on with the labor market, because they include payments from the government that are not wages. |
| 1:16.6 | So the BEA offers another measure of income. Personal income excluding transfers like social security |
| 1:23.6 | payments and so forth. That's Menzzi Chen, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, |
| 1:28.8 | Madison. If you're trying to get at the sort of underlying state of the private sector, personal |
| 1:34.6 | income excluding the current transfers is more useful. Right now, that number is telling us that |
| 1:41.9 | income has been falling. It peaked back in September. |
| 1:45.3 | Shannon Grind is an economist with Wells Fargo. |
| 1:47.7 | She says one thing that's dragging it down is inflation. |
| 1:50.7 | Higher prices are eroding a lot of the purchasing power of households, which is obviously a challenge. |
| 1:56.0 | Grine says wage growth is slowing too because demand for labor is weak. |
| 2:00.1 | No matter how you want to characterize that the labor market has moderated over the past |
| 2:03.3 | number of years, right? We're basically at stall speed in terms of hiring. The latest |
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