In 2015, the government of Finland announced a new program that on its surface had progressives pretty excited . Beginning in 2017, 2,000 Finns would receive a flat monthly of €560 (about $685). It seemed like a concrete step toward implementing a universal basic income– a no-strings-attached, economic-security-boosting financial floor for people that’s been praised by everyone from Bernie Sanders to Mark Zuckerberg.

So when Finland recently made it clear that they will not continue to administer the program after the end of 2018, several outlets–most prominently The New York Times–read it as a death knell for universal basic income, and “a reflection of public discomfort with the idea of dispensing government largess free of requirements that its recipients seek work.”

To interpret what happened with the Finland program in this way is not only incorrect, it also does a disservice to the other universal basic income experiments currently in the works from Stockton and Oakland, California, to Kenya to Ontario.

The whole premise of a true universal income program is that people can be eligible to receive the supplemental payment regardless of whether or not they work. While the income threshold for receiving the benefit necessarily varies by context, generally the idea is to help people clear the poverty threshold wherever they live.

In Finland, the government only made the basic income stipend available to people who were already unemployed. “That’s really the biggest distinctive factor compared to what a universal basic income program is,” says Ioana Marinescu, a professor and economist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies labor market policies. And it was always the plan, Marinescu adds, for the Finland trial to conclude at the end of 2018. So it’s not that the government is axing the program–they’re just choosing not to extend it, and not to expand it for people who are employed but low-income. The organizers of Finland’s trial have also issued a statement correcting the misconception around the ending of the trial.

Limiting the basic income program to unemployed people serves a very different function than including all people below a certain income threshold. Unemployed people in Finland are already eligible for a benefits package roughly equal in value to the basic income payment. The difference in this two-year program is that people would still receive the basic-income stipend even if they secured a job, while traditional unemployment benefits disappear once someone starts working. “Those benefit cliffs are always a trap,” says Matt Bruenig, founder of the nonprofit think tank People’s Policy Project. That structure effectively disincentives unemployed people from seeking work, because even if they accept a part-time job, the extra income could cost them their benefits, which in Finland are very robust.

Finland’s goal, Marinescu says, “was to understand in what way this might affect the behavior of the unemployed in terms of looking for and finding jobs.” Earlier this year, Finland changed their basic income program to make the stipend contingent on recipients actively seeking or securing work, which was very unpopular among the Finnish public, and effectively mirrors similar conservative American welfare policies.