I'm just here for the health benefits

**Angel Carreras** (0:01)
NPR.

**Adrian Ma** (0:06)
This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma.
And joining me today from behind the producer's curtain is Angel Carreras. Hello.

**Angel Carreras** (0:15)
It is so bright in here without the producer curtains.

**Adrian Ma** (0:18)
Yes. Put on your safety goggles because it is bright in here. We are about to shine a light on the US job numbers. It's Jobs Friday.

**Angel Carreras** (0:30)
That's right. That's the day of the month where we look at the latest government jobs report and we check in and see how American workers are doing.

**Adrian Ma** (0:36)
This month's jobs report was a bit of a shocker. The overall economy lost 23,000 jobs, worse than economists were expecting. And the numbers for May and June were actually revised downwards by about 100,000 jobs.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 4.1 percent, but only because about 260,000 people stopped looking for a job. So the job market definitely seems to be cooling off.

**Angel Carreras** (1:02)
Yeah. And you know, Adrian, on Jobs Fridays, we talk about how having a job is good. But the thing we don't talk about sometimes, having a job sucks.
I mean, I'm joking, of course, except for the time I worked for a restaurant that sold Popeye's Chicken as its own.

**Adrian Ma** (1:17)
We needed to make that its own episode.

**Angel Carreras** (1:18)
One day.
But something that is not to be joked about, Adrian, dreams. Sometimes, we can't chase those in the economy when we stay at a job solely because we need the health benefits.

**Richard Leonars** (1:27)
I've been trying to move to something else or even do my own thing. But the health insurance definitely restricts the ability to say, hey, I'm going to do what you love type thing.

**Angel Carreras** (1:41)
This is Richard Leonars.
He has spent 14 years at his current job as a product manager for a consumer electronics company. It's not exactly because he wanted to.

**Richard Leonars** (1:50)
If you're not enjoying what you're doing or really not passionate about it, you should be able to quit and start something else, but that's just not realistic.

**Adrian Ma** (1:59)
Today on the show, job lock. Roughly half of Americans would leave their job tomorrow if they didn't need the money.
And here in the USA, we have a unique type of job lock. Many people would leave their jobs tomorrow if they didn't need the health benefits.

**Angel Carreras** (2:16)
Yeah, and I mean, by doing this, workers pass up on doing things like joining a startup, starting a startup, even doing a career change, because they just can't afford to lose that sweet, sweet employer-provided health insurance.

**Adrian Ma** (2:27)
So what are the economic consequences, the human consequences? We talked to a health policy expert and someone who is living the job lock reality.

**Angel Carreras** (2:39)
Richard Leonars lives in New Jersey.
He spent the past 14 years as a director of product management for a consumer electronics company. And he's also spent nearly half his 50-ish years of life in that business overall.

**Adrian Ma** (2:50)
That's a lot of experience, a lot of skills accrued, exactly the kind of worker the economy wants. And to top it off, he had sketches for a business, if he ever gets the chance to strike out on his own.

**Richard Leonars** (3:02)
I enjoy, you know, some sort of retail, maybe, electronics type thing, music related. So something that kind of takes more of that creative element to either open up a store or a training center or teaching or things like that.

**Angel Carreras** (3:18)
He's got one customer and me. And he even stashed away some money to chase this idea.

**Richard Leonars** (3:23)
I've been thinking savings to kind of make it worthwhile for maybe six, seven months to try something and push at it.
But after that, then it would be a struggle. You know, how do you pay for the health insurance side of things?

**Adrian Ma** (3:38)
For Richard, leaving his job means leaving his health insurance. And health benefit-related job lock, like Richard's, is on the rise. A recent Gallup survey found that around 23 million adults are in this type of job lock. That's about one in four workers.
And get this, about five years ago, it was only about 16% of workers surveyed who said they feel like they can't leave their job because they'd lose their health insurance.

**Angel Carreras** (4:04)
So we called up Larry Levitt and asked if these numbers and experiences like Richard's match what he's hearing.
Larry is executive vice president for health policy at KAF, a nonpartisan health policy and news organization. They maybe even sent you a survey.