The link between economic and physical health also happens to be at the core of America’s decade-old Affordable Care Act. There’s now enough data showing that the job market in states initially refusing and subsequently embracing the health-care law’s most controversial safety net outperformed states still opposed to it. That’s a lesson the governors of ACA holdout states like Florida, Georgia and Tennessee should remember, especially as they press to free their economies from the coronavirus restrictions that are intended to save lives and to make any recovery that much stronger.

Obamacare was designed to allow the entire population to gain private or public health care funded with corporate, federal and state revenue that combined would reduce the national burden and strengthen the economy. It specifically allowed children to remain insured on a parent’s policy until age 26, required the equal treatment of people with preexisting conditions, and prohibited annual or lifetime coverage limits. Most important, it expanded eligibility for Medicaid, the government program for people of all ages whose resources are insufficient to pay for health care.

The coronavirus is making it clear, in Benjamin Franklin’s words, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

That was also the conclusion of two former national security officials — Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy between 2009 and 2012, and Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA — in a Washington Post essay earlier this month. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said recently in the New York Times that bringing the economy back to life after the coronavirus pandemic “should also pursue universal health care coverage, preferably through a public option, while at the same time reducing our system’s overall costs, which far exceed other developed economies’.”

With Obamacare, the nation’s uninsured rate dropped to a record-low 10.9% in 2016 from a record-high 16.7% in 2010. It has since climbed to 13.7% under President Donald Trump, who called Obamacare “really bad health care” as he eliminated some of its safeguards and celebrated a 2018 decision by a U.S. judge in Texas agreeing with 20 states challenging its constitutionality.

When Obamacare became effective in 2013, its increased eligibility for Medicaid was welcomed by 27 states, led by New York, whose uninsured rate declined to a record-low 4.7%, and California, where the rate declined to 7.2%.

The 23 other states, all of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and were led by Republican legislatures, initially opposed the Medicaid expansion program, which today insures 1 in 5 Americans. But nine of these red states adopted the Medicaid expansion in 2014, providing an opportunity to compare their labor participation and employment rates over two five-year periods (2010-2014), (2015-2019) with the rates of the 14 still resisting its adoption.

While employment is simply the number of jobs, labor participation is the measure of workers with jobs and the number of people seeking work divided by the total working-age population. When labor participation rises, more people have jobs or are seeking them or both.

For the nine states that belatedly embraced the Medicaid expansion, the labor participation rate during the five years before 2014 declined an average 2.2%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. During the next five years, the labor participation rate rose an average 0.7%, amounting to an improvement of 2.9 percentage points. Kentucky improved 5.4 percentage points, followed by Arizona, at 4.4 percentage points, and Michigan, which improved 3.1 percentage points.

The average labor participation rate for the 14 states refusing Medicaid expansion declined 2.2% in the five years before 2014 and fell another 0.2% in the subsequent five years, representing an inferior improvement of 2 percentage points, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Texas experienced an initial 1.5% drop followed by another 0.3% decline, for a total gain of 1.2%. Florida saw a 2.2% decline in the first five years and 0.2% drop in the ensuing five-year period. Wisconsin fell 1.5% initially and an additional 1.2% in the second five years, for an improvement of 0.3%.

While Arizona, Kentucky and Michigan saw their labor participation rates climb since 2014, Florida, Texas and Wisconsin showed only a smaller average rate of decline.

Employment growth shows a similar dichotomy. Total employees for the nine states that voted for Trump and adopted the Medicaid expansion in 2014 increased 4.9% in the five preceding years and 6.5% in the subsequent five years, an improvement of 1.6%. Kentucky jobs gained 2.1% in the initial period and then tripled in the five years ending in 2019, a favorable difference of 4.2 percentage points.

In Texas, the second-most populous state where employment increased 13.4% to 12.5 million during the five years before the end of 2014, the job growth decelerated by 3.4 percentage points during the next five years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Obamacare in its fullest incarnation shows that when people know their health care is secure, more of them have jobs and more of them will find them in a robust economy.

That’s gone now in the dark days of the coronavirus. But when the recovery begins, augmenting the Affordable Care Act may be something even capitalists and socialists can agree on.

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Winkler is co-founder of Bloomberg News (1990) and editor in chief emeritus; Bloomberg Opinion columnist since 2015; co-founder of Bloomberg Business Journalism Diversity Program in 2017. During his 25 years as editor in chief, Bloomberg News was a three-time finalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and received numerous George Polk, Gerald Loeb, Overseas Press Club and Society of Professional Journalists and Editors (Sabew) awards.

When Fed officials hold their regular policy-making meeting next week, all the lights on their dashboard will be flashing red. The unemployment rate is expected to reach double digits by June. With global demand cratering, the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation will likely fall to 1% or even lower by the end of the year – well below its target of 2%. And in the absence of a Covid-19 vaccine, the malaise will likely persist well into 2021.

Any Economics 101 student knows that in such a dire situation, the central bank should cut interest rates to stimulate growth and job creation. But as Chair Jerome Powell reiterated last month, the Fed doesn’t plan to do so in the foreseeable future, because a further quarter-percentage-point cut would drive the interest rate it pays on banks’ reserve deposits into negative territory.

Why the fear of negative rates? A decade ago, the answer would have been that it was impossible to go below zero: Banks would simply avoid the charges by withdrawing their reserve deposits and holding the funds in paper currency, which pays zero interest. But economists now recognize that doesn’t happen, because it’s costly to store billions (or trillions) of dollars of paper currency safely. Several European central banks, as well as the Bank of Japan, have successfully taken interest rates below zero.

This stimulates consumer demand in the usual ways: by incentivizing banks to make loans at lower interest rates, to bid up the prices of financial assets, and to charge higher fees for deposits.

Another of the Fed’s concerns about negative rates has to do with financial stability – a relatively new (and completely made up) responsibility of central banks. Sure, negative interest rates would help lower the unemployment rate from what is likely to be its highest level since World War II. But officials worry that they will also weigh on banks’ profitability, pushing down share prices and making the financial system more vulnerable to distress. Put crudely, the Fed is giving up on unemployment reductions to help keep banks and their shareholders safer.

The Fed is inventing a trade-off where none exists. If the central bank really cares about financial stability, it has many tools to ensure it. Right now, for example, it could block large banks from paying dividends, a practice that erodes the capital they need to absorb losses. None of this precludes a monetary policy focused on the Fed’s congressional mandate of maximizing employment and keeping inflation near target.

So, the Fed is left no good argument against going negative. Terrifyingly high unemployment and potentially rapid disinflation are powerful arguments in favor. Next week, the Fed should take interest rates at least a quarter percentage point below zero.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Kocherlakota is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.

Washington, D.C., is enjoying its cleanest air in at least 25 years, thanks to decades of local, state, and federal policies combined with a wet, windy spring. Bicycles abound; there’s almost no car traffic. Birdsong awakens us, sometimes far too early. There is, of course, a global pandemic element to the quietness, and pandemic-induced shutdowns are really not the way to way to get clean air. The same way an economic collapse is really not the best way to get cheap gasoline.

There’s another thing I can see that Earth Day’s founders would be delighted by. On my roof, barely visible through a skylight, is a solar-power system that will more than meet my power demand for the day. It’s a small thing now, but it would have been an unimaginably big deal in 1970. Five decades on from the first Earth Day, an energy resolution that started low and slow is now changing the world in real time.

It all started 16 years before the first Earth Day, in 1954, when Bell Laboratories unveiled the first photovoltaic cell. They called it the “solar battery,” and the ads for it are charming. “The same kindly rays that help the flowers and the grains and the fruits to grow,” reads one, “also send us almost limitless power.” But the early marketing also contained a strong dose of realism: “There’s still much to be done before the battery’s possibilities in telephony and for other uses are fully developed.”

Much to be done, indeed. Photovoltaics were wildly expensive, complex to produce, and tiny. There wasn’t even a commercial application for them until 1962 with the Telstar 1, the “first privately sponsored space-faring mission” and the first satellite to relay a transatlantic television signal. Now solar power is standard on satellites.

Other uses followed-power for weather stations, pipeline monitoring systems, and off-grid homes-until developments in the mid-1970s made it possible to put a commercial value on PV cells. Make no mistake, they still weren’t cheap. The earliest data BloombergNEF has on solar costs shows that panels went for more than $100 per watt in 1976. A residential solar installation needs output of at least several kilowatts. That means a few years after the first Earth Day, a pioneering solar homeowner would have had to spend tens of thousands just on panels, not to mention the costs of engineering, installation, and power equipment.

What a difference four decades makes. Last year, one PV panel cost $0.23 per watt-a 99.3% decrease. Entire systems now cost less than what the PV module alone cost just seven years ago. Today’s panels are also much better than what came before: more efficient, more reliable, more durable, and lighter-weight. I could heft a solar panel on my own if I wanted to. My neighborhood is now dotted with “We went solar!” signs.

To put that in context, let’s look at another energy revolution underway before Earth Day No. 1: nuclear power. In 1954, just a few months after Bell Labs brought its Solar Battery to market, Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, gave a speech to the National Association of Science Writers in New York. There’s a key section, one that’s been bandied about often since:

“Transmutation of the elements-unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered-these and a host of other results all in 15 short years. It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a life span far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast for an age of peace.”

Needless to say, the harnessing of the atom didn’t give us energy that’s “too cheap to meter.” Building a new plant now costs tens of billions of dollars, meaning that newly built nuclear power has a hard time competing in many power markets. But the PV module has fulfilled Strauss’ vision and then some: it gave us energy that’s so cheap, people are being paid to use it.

Negative prices are a feature of a properly functioning energy market, and perhaps you noticed on Monday that the key U.S. oil benchmark closed trading at -$37.63 a barrel. Those are cases where the market must pay someone to take product away to balance supply and demand. It’s happening now in electricity, too, thanks to solar and wind power.

Clear skies over Germany meant that intraday wholesale power prices were negative earlier this week. In Britain on April 19, electric vehicle charging platform Ohme said that its customers were paid 69 pence to add 130 miles of charge to their vehicles.

This is bigger than the market havoc of the pandemic. It’s just the beginning, really, of an energy world with more and more moments of being better than too cheap to meter. People will get paid to charge. Services will crop up, on-demand, to use free or negatively-priced electricity. Fleets of electrolyzers will use renewable electrons to produce hydrogen and help reduce emissions in steel, cement, and glass production that are right now a tremendous environmental challenge.

And that’s the revolution. It would have seemed ridiculous even 10 years ago, much less 50, and yet here we are.

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Bullard is a BloombergNEF analyst who writes the Sparklines newsletter about the global transition to renewable energy.

Over the past few weeks, we have seen governments implementing additional precautionary measures – from travel bans and nationwide lockdowns to intensified border control and regulations – in a bid to contain the spread of Covid-19.

While deemed necessary for the nation’s health and safety, some of these measures can have a potentially damaging impact on a country’s food security.

It is therefore critical that governments and the industry come together now to ensure that food supply chains remain open and that food production continues unhindered so consumers can have continued access to safe, healthy and nutritious food during this pandemic.

This is especially important for the Asean region, where the food-value chain is highly integrated and involves multiple stakeholders. What we must do is ensure each country keeps its supply chain open. Closures or disruptions of food supply chains in one country can have a devastating impact on other countries and we are already starting to see this play out following the decision made by some governments to suspend the export of staples and other commodities.

If countries across the region begin following suit and implementing such protectionist measures by effectively closing their supply chain, consumers will find it even more difficult to access healthy food and adequate nutrition, especially during this time of crisis.

Closing off food supply chains within Asean will also have extensive economic impacts because the region’s food-value chain is a major driver of the member nations’ gross domestic product (GDP) and employment. Alone, it contributes around US$500 billion (Bt16.34 trillion) of economic output – about 17 per cent of Asean’s GDP – and 113 million jobs.

Essential service

To prevent such issues, which bring added pressure to an already critical situation, governments need to consider the food and beverage industry as an essential infrastructure, and minimise disruptions to the region’s food supply chain.

This means making sure that their countries’ food supply chains can continue to operate at full capacity. Where possible, and with the industry’s cooperation to reinforce efforts to keep employees safe and healthy, there should be exemptions made to measures that restrict the movement of workers to and from food-manufacturing facilities so the production of food and beverage is not hampered.

In doing so, the industry and government bodies must also ensure an adequate supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) so workers are well-equipped and protected.

Governments also need to ensure that the measures they put in place do not delay or disrupt the flow of manufactured products, ingredients and raw materials including food packaging material. For instance, blockages imposed on transport routes should not affect the flow of food and beverage items into a country. Transport vehicles delivering essential food items should be granted entry and be exempted from restrictions across national, state and district borders.

The more vulnerable and food-insecure countries should also be supported by those that are more resilient and have more supplies, particularly in perishable and associated items. This would mean reducing tariffs to facilitate the flow of food and commodities during this time of crisis.

At the same time, it is also important for governments to ensure that the retail sector can continue selling food and beverages uninterrupted so people have easy and convenient access to food.

At an industry level, we recognise that companies must also adapt to the challenges and continue providing access to essential food and beverages amid changing consumer needs during the crisis.

We are already seeing a number of food companies shift their production to focus on packaged and frozen foods to meet the surge in demand from consumers who require packaged food with longer shelf-life as they experience longer movement-control orders around the region.

Keep consumers reassured

It is still uncertain when the coronavirus pandemic will be fully contained, but it is critical that governments continue to keep their people assured that they will have access to essential food products.

Countries need to remain calm and come together in solidarity instead of resorting to protectionist measures that restrict the flow of food as these will only serve to sow division, lead to retaliatory action and instigate further panic.

Now, more than ever, is the time for us to take action collectively to keep food supply chains open and to protect the flow of food so consumers can remain healthy with access to necessary, safe and high-quality food during this global pandemic.

The private sector is calling on the government to help by paying 50 per cent of employees’ salaries, especially for those who have been forced by the Covid-19 outbreak to take leave without pay, and is also asking it to cut down the wages it has to pay to daily wage earners from eight hours to no less than four hours a day. There are concerns that the outbreak will last for another two to three months, which may result in up to 10 million people losing their jobs.

Suphan Mongkolsuthee, chairman of the board of directors of the Federation of Thai Industries (FTI), said the Joint Standing Committee on Commerce Industry and Banking (JSCCIB) has decided to encourage the Thai Credit Guarantee Corporation (TCG) to provide 80 per cent credit guarantee for loans taken by SMEs up from the current 40 per cent, reduce employers’ social security contribution from 4 per cent to 1 per cent and cut down on electricity bills by 5 per cent.

In addition, he said, the Social Security Office should help businesses affected by Covid-19 by helping to pay 50 per cent of the employees’ wages calculated from a base salary of no more than Bt15,000 or no more than Bt7,500 per employee. The employer will pay another 25 per cent of the wages and deduct this expense to cut down on corporate income tax.

There are some 18 million people who come under the social security system, of them about 10 million are severely affected by the pandemic and should receive aid, so entrepreneurs can continue employing them.

“If the government does not help these operators, a lot of businesses will be closed leaving more people unemployed. If these businesses can maintain their workforce, then they will not have to start all over again once the situation improves,” Suphan said.

As for helping SMEs, the government should improve the procurement regulations for government agencies to use locally manufactured products as well as speed up payments to private contractors working on government projects to boost their liquidity. The government should also waive corporate taxes for SMEs for two years, because most small businesses have almost no revenue and some are even making losses. The government should also cut down on the mortgage fees and land transfers to 0.01 per cent.

In order to further reduce costs for entrepreneurs, the government should get rid of red tape and allow requests to be made online, as it will greatly reduce the operators’ expenses and cut down on travel during the pandemic.

Kalin Sarasin, chairman of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, said that according to private estimates, at least 7 million people are expected to be unemployed in the next two months. If the Covid-19 situation continues for another two to three months, the unemployment numbers may rise to 10 million, including unverified labourers. Therefore, he said, the government should speed up the disbursement of loans to entrepreneurs and grant income tax benefits for businesses that have accumulated losses for the past five to seven years.

The authorities should also automatically renew work visas for foreigners working in Thailand at least until May 31.

As for helping the private sector’s help with the fight against Covid-19, the government should completely waive taxes so businesses have more money in hand to fight the contagion.