The Senate yesterday approved a measure that includes a continuation of current unemployment benefit extensions and COBRA insurance subsidies through the end of the year. The bill, which also includes a six month extension of increased reimbursements to states for Medicaid and additional state fiscal relief, passed by a vote of 62 to 36. It now goes to the House, which may pass it as is or seek to work through any differences with the Senate version in a conference. Either way, action for final approval before it’s signed by President Obama needs to be swift, as these programs currently extend only through March 31.
When signed into law, the bill would ensure a continuation of all current extended unemployment compensation (EUC) and extended benefits (EB) programs, as well as the additional $25 per week unemployment insurance (UI) payment and the federal 65% subsidy to eligible COBRA beneficiaries.
Six Republicans joined 56 Democrats voting in favor of the bill. Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska was the single “No” vote among Senate Democrats. The Republicans voting “Yes” were Senators Bond (MO), Collins (ME), Snowe (ME), Murkowski (AK), Vitter (LA) and Voinovich (OH).
The Senate has posted the results of the Roll Call Vote on the bill.
Action on the measure in the Senate came on the same day that the Department of Labor released the latest state-by-state unemployment figures.
Comparing the Roll Call Vote and the states’ unemployment report reveals that many Republican Senators from states with high, and in many cases double-digit unemployment rates opposed the jobless benefit extensions.
Some examples, with the unemployment rate for the state and Senators voting against the benefits extension:
Alabama 11.1%
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R)
Sen. Richard Shelby (R)
Arizona 9.2%
Sen. Jon Kyl (R)
Sen. John McCain (R)
Florida 11.9%
Sen. George LeMieux (R)
Georgia 10.4%
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R)
Sen. Johnny Isakson (R)
Kentucky 10.7%
Sen. Jim Bunning (R)
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R)
Mississippi 10.9%
Sen. Thad Cochran (R)
Sen. Roger Wicker (R)
North Carolina 11.1%
Sen. Richard Burr (R)
South Carolina 12.6%
Sen. Jim DeMint (R)
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R)
Tennessee 10.7%
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R)
Sen. Bob Corker (R)
Tags: COBRA, jobless benefit extension, unemployment
Having beaten the Republican obstruction spearheaded by Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) of a 30-day continuation of extended unemployment benefits last week, the Senate returns today to a larger measure that would continue those programs through 2010.
The New York Times reported yesterday:
The tax measure on the Senate floor would extend added unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for those out of work through December while also renewing more than $31 billion in tax breaks sought by the business community. It will also have to return to the House, and approval of that bill is likely weeks off.
But Democrats would like to complete it by the end of the month, since the temporary extension of the unemployment benefits that survived last week’s temporary blockade by Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, will again be expiring. Senators would no doubt like to avoid a repeat of that clash.
Late last week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) filed a motion for cloture on the unemployment and COBRA subsidy extension legislation — generically known as the tax-extenders bill — and that will require 60 votes in the Senate to pass.
Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Patty Murray (D-WA) proposed a joint amendment combining emergency aid and employment assistance to needy families with an expanded program providing summer jobs for young people. Unfortunately, the amendment just failed to gain the 60 votes required to waive the Senate’s budget rule and was tabled.
The Kerry-Murray amendment would have made $1.3 billion available to extend the TANF Emergency Fund program through March 2011, an additional 6 months beyond its current September 2010 expiration. The amendment would also have provided another $1.3 billion to create an estimated 500,000 summer jobs and training opportunities for young people up to the age of 24 across the country. In failing to pass the amendment, the Senate caved to pressure from those more concerned with the politics of deficit fears than the well-being of America’s struggling families.
As the latest jobs report showed, nearly 16 million Americans are unemployed, according to the not-seasonally-adjusted statistics. An estimated 11 million are receiving essential unemployment benefits, while more than 6 million have remained jobless for six months or more.
The Senate needs to pass the jobless aid extension measure — it’s an economic and moral imperative.
You can help get the 60 votes to pass these essential programs.
Click here to connect with your Senators and tell them to pass the unemployment insurance and COBRA extensions today.
Tags: COBRA, jobless benefits extentsion, unemployment
Attempts to pass an emergency one month extension of expanded jobless benefit programs continued to be blocked in the Senate yesterday by retiring Republican Senator and Hall of Fame Shame pitcher Jim Bunning of Kentucky.
More than 200,000 jobless workers will lose unemployment benefits this week as the February 28th cut-off to extend benefits lapses without Senate action, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) announced today.
Sen. Bunning continued to block the emergency measure again this morning, even objecting to a request by Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins.
From ABC via AP:
Sen. Jim Bunning has again blocked the Senate from extending unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless.
The Kentucky Republican objected Tuesday to a request by Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a fellow Republican, to pass a 30-day extension of jobless benefits and other expired measures. The measure would also extend highway programs and prevent a big cut in Medicare payments to doctors.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are moving forward with a plan that includes a full year extension of the jobless aid programs first put in place in last year’s Recovery Act, a move we’ve been urging them to take all along.
The Washington Post reports:
The measure includes one-year extensions of unemployment insurance and COBRA, making the benefits retroactive to Feb. 28 to compensate those whose benefits have temporarily run out. It would continue the increased level of funding for state Medicaid programs that began with last year’s stimulus package, and provide extra help for pension funds that were hit hard by the economic recession.
McClatchy has a fantastic map showing what they dub “the Bunning effect.”
The Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal unloaded on Bunning in today’s editorial titled Bunning’s True Colors:
Jim Bunning partisans will say that the Kentucky junior senator’s most recent headline-grabbing display of obstinate oafishness was really a principled stand. His lone vote — not once, but twice — to block the extension of unemployment and health benefits to unemployed Americans, a vote that also stalled road projects and furloughed those workers, was purportedly all about forcing the country to pay as it goes, even when it comes to extending safety nets to those feeling the worst pains of the worst recession in modern American history. (Question: Did he demand the same standard for bankrolling the wars?)
The penury of even his political soul is breathtaking and is nothing to be admired or emulated. Indeed, a series of missteps, misstatements and other embarrassments so alienated Mr. Bunning from his Senate peers, his fellow Republican Party members and all but the most bovine party-line voters in his home state that he could not run for re-election for a seat that should have been his until he was ready to meet his maker. Instead, he’s raging — and cussing — at the dying of the spotlight. If only he could exit stage right now.
Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl yesterday defended Bunning on the Senate floor and attacked unemployment insurance, saying that for jobless workers “unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work”.
“I’m sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can’t argue that it’s a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it’s a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here,” said Kyl.
Kyl’s not just mean. He’s wrong.
By every economic indicator, the extension of jobless aid provided by the Recovery Act should continue through the end of year. As recently documented by the Congressional Budget Office, the extension of jobless aid also provides the most significant boost to the economy and job growth of any policy option being debated by Congress. It provides $1.90 in stimulus for every dollar spent, and will be responsible for creating 800,000 jobs this year alone.
With new unemployment claims surging it’s way past time for Congress to pass an extension of critical jobless aid programs through 2010.
Tell Congress to pass the full-year extension of UI and COBRA now.
And tell Senator Bunning (202-224-4343) and Senator Kyl (202-224-4521) to get out of the way.
Tags: COBRA, jobless benefits extentsion, unemployment
Let’s say you’ve been getting COBRA subsidies, or you have just been laid off and want to find out if you are eligible. And you’ve heard about extensions and the possibility of people losing their coverage and you just want to know what’s going on.
The New York Times has some very useful information for you.
Founding Executive Director of Families USA Ron Pollack took questions here, answering questions not just about subsidies but about eligibility for COBRA at all—for instance, some states have their own continuation coverage programs—and about how to move from COBRA to new insurance.
In another article, they provided some general advice under the headings:
Avoid a lapse
Buy time
Stay on top of it
Look for reductions
Newly laid off?
What we need is an economy where people don’t live in fear that losing a job will mean losing their health care and maybe their lives. But while we’re dealing with this economy, being informed is an important defense.
Tags: COBRA, unemployment
This is what’s reportedly coming today:
Lawmakers expect to extend the deadline to file for jobless benefits and the COBRA health coverage subsidy by two months. As it stands now, the deadline to apply for federally paid unemployment benefits and for the 65% insurance subsidy is Dec. 31. It would also maintain the stimulus-funded $25 boost in unemployment benefits through February.
An extension buys time for the million workers who otherwise would lose their benefits in January. But two months?
That’s not as much as this editorial from a Florida newspaper calls for:
The White House rightly wants to extend the COBRA aid at least six months.
Congress should do so quickly, possibly by adding funds for the longer health insurance lifeline to job-growth legislation in the works, and make it retroactive to cover the gap.
Finding the money to prolong COBRA subsidies won’t be easy but should be done to help the increasing numbers of unemployed — including many in Florida — in the jobless recovery.
Or this one in Michigan:
Legislation has been introduced in the House and Senate to extend benefits. A bill from Rep. Joe Sestak, D-PA, would increase the subsidy six months for a maximum of 15 months and allow people who lose their jobs in the first six months of 2010 to receive the break — ending the aid at the end of that year. That’s reasonable in this economy. What’s not is expecting families scrambling to pay utilities, car payments and mortgages to pay full health-insurance premiums.
These workers in Illinois don’t get to write editorials, but, having lost their jobs when the plant they worked at shut down, here’s what they say:
Former workers hope that a hearing on Thursday in Chicago might grant them 60 days of severance pay.
There are worries now about the cost of health care getting even higher. That’s as a 65% tax subsidy for COBRA benefits is beginning to run out without an extension.
“Trying to stay healthy,” she said. “So that you don’t get sick and have to go to the doctor. No insurance? It’s scary — very, very scary.”
Outside the vacant plant, paychecks have vanished along with the health care. Displaced workers just can’t afford the cost.
Two months of extended COBRA benefits will be an actual lifesaver for a few people who otherwise wouldn’t get the care they needed during those two months. But it won’t last until the unemployment rate drops to a manageable level. Two months just means that in two months, we’ll have to have this fight again.
Tags: COBRA
Last week we reported on the crisis facing state and federal jobless aid and unemployed health insurance benefits.
On Monday, according to The New York Times, a group of state labor officials were joined by labor, civil rights and unemployed advocacy groups in A Plea to Congress on Jobless Benefits.
State labor officials and worker advocates on Monday appealed for quick Congressional action to extend emergency unemployment benefits and to renew health insurance subsidies for the long-term jobless.
Prolonged unemployment insurance, passed this year in the stimulus act, expires this month, and officials estimate that more than one million workers will see benefits end in January if Congress does not act.
The health subsidies, under which the federal government pays 65 percent of insurance costs under Cobra for up to nine months, have already expired and are not available to the newly unemployed, who will have to pay family premiums averaging $1,100 if they want to keep their existing health plans.
Renewal this month of both forms of aid is “a moral imperative,” Sandi Vito, the secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, said at a news conference here on Monday. Ms. Vito, who was joined by senior labor officials from seven other states, said the extensions were needed “through at least the end of 2010 as a bridge for people.”
The National Employment Law Project, or NELP
estimates that in January alone over 1million workers will lose access to federal jobless benefits.
This number includes nearly 466,000 workers who were laid off in July 2009 and will exhaust their 26 weeks of state benefits without qualifying for any additional federal assistance. Because the ARRA expires, they will not be able to access the next stages of unemployment assistance—the temporary EUC extension program or the permanent program of Extended Benefits.
In addition nearly 570,000 workers who have already moved from state to federal benefits will not be eligible to continue receiving EUC past their current “tier” of benefits. EUC has four tiers of benefits but workers will not be able to progress to the next tier once their current one runs out in January.
Among the organizations joining the call for Congressional action today were the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the AFL-CIO, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the National Women’s Law Center.
NELP has on online call to action you can sign urging Congress to reauthorize the jobless aid provision extensions.
Tags: COBRA, unemployment, unemployment extension
Yesterday, millions of unemployed Americans lost their federal health insurance subsidies. Next month, a million or more could lose their unemployment insurance benefits.
At a time when long-term joblessness is at record levels, and with more than 15 million Americans unemployed, the safety net of benefits that helps sustain those out of work is fraying and disintegrating.
In a piece tucked away in the health care column of today’s New York Times Katherine Seelye reports Millions of Jobless Lose Insurance Aid:
The changes that the health care bills in Congress envision are years away — not soon enough to help the millions of unemployed people who, on Monday, lost their temporary federal subsidies for health insurance.
The subsidies, which Congress approved earlier this year under the economic stimulus package, expired Monday for the first wave of recipients. The package provided $25 billion in temporary financial help for unemployed people who were still on their employers’ insurance plans under the decades-old Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, popularly known as Cobra.
The subsidies were intended to allow an estimated seven million people who lost their jobs from September 2008 to December 2009 to help keep that insurance for up to nine months starting in March; normally they would have to pay the full premiums, but the subsidies covered 65 percent of that cost.
Some Democrats have introduced legislation outside of the health care bills to extend the Cobra subsidies a few months and even increase them. The subject may come up as part of a new jobs bill in the near future, but nothing has been approved so far.
Even with a Congressional renewal of the program, millions would still face losing both the subsidies and their COBRA eligibility entirely. As currently constructed COBRA eligibility itself runs out after 18 months. Clearly, the epidemic of long-term unemployment is exacerbating the health care crisis, swelling the ranks of the uninsured.
Now, without further Congressional action, unemployment insurance benefits will also run out in January for another 1 million jobless workers. According to a report by the National Employment Law Project:
one million workers will become ineligible for unemployment benefits in January 2010 unless Congress reauthorizes the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s unemployment insurance programs by the end of December. The critical benefits provided to jobless workers by the ARRA are set to expire at the end of the year, which means that even with the latest 14 to 20 week extension enacted in November, 30,000 workers a day will be left without any jobless benefits in January. By March, the number without federal jobless benefits will swell to nearly three million workers.
Weren’t unemployment benefits just recently extended? Well, yes; and no. As The New York Times reported:
The record extension of emergency benefits that was signed into law on Nov. 6 was widely praised as a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of Americans who had spent a year or more in fruitless searches for jobs.
But many legislators, state aid officials and struggling workers apparently failed to read the fine print. The added federal benefits were built on a series of previous extensions that are slated to end on Dec. 31, unless Congress renews these programs. People who lost their jobs after July 1 of this year, for example, would receive no federal extensions once their customary six months of state aid ran out.
While discussions have started, Congress is not yet considering a specific proposal. And unless it acts before the Christmas break, officials warn, the extensions will end.
An earlier ‘Main Street’ post today by Laura Clawson includes an urgent Congressional call to action.
Swift and decisive action is needed from the Administration and the Congress to address the urgent jobless aid crisis.
Tags: COBRA, unemployment insurance
