Facebook
Fark
Digg
Reddit
StumbleCongress races to restore benefits subsidy for laid-off workers
Published Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2009 | 4:06 p.m.
Updated Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009 | 2:01 a.m.
Related Stories
- New $100 billion safety net for jobless in works (12-1-2009)
- Laid-off workers face expiration of health benefit (11-30-2009)
Sun Archives
- Their stories heard on the Hill (11-4-2009)
- Desperate for insurance, residents share health care woes (9-18-2009)
- Health costs burden business (11-20-2009)
- Feds post COBRA forms, laid off employees to get break (3-19-2009)
Beyond the Sun
Sun Coverage
WASHINGTON -- Buried amid the promises of new bridges, roads and recessionary aid in the Recovery Act passed this year by Congress was one tangible benefit for the unemployed: a subsidy to help pay health benefits for those who are laid off.
This week the nine-month subsidy begins to phase out, leaving Congress scrambling to renew the aid.
For Nevada families, who would pay $1,038 a month on average to continue to receive employer-sponsored health care benefits, the savings are substantial. According to a report from Families USA, a health care advocacy organization, average costs with the subsidy drop to $363 a month.
Estimates show 7 million Americans would benefit from the subsidy, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The cost was estimated at $25 billion.
“This is a benefit that’s very important,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA. “It has been a lifeline. That lifeline is now being withdrawn.”
Under the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in February, those who are laid off from their jobs can receive the subsidy to help pay for employer-sponsored health care benefits under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985. COBRA allows laid-off workers to continue their health insurance through their former employer for 18 months if they pay the full premium cost and possible administrative costs.
For many jobless people, however, COBRA premiums are too pricey. The Families USA study found that in several states premium costs exceed unemployment benefits.
In Nevada a laid-off worker would spend 75 percent of his average monthly $1,378 unemployment check to pay the insurance premium, the report said.
Under the Recovery Act, the government provides 65 percent toward the costs of premiums for nine months. The program began in March, and those who signed up then have now exhausted the benefit.
December is the final month to sign up for the subsidy, and those who enroll now will receive the subsidy through August. Those who are laid off next month will be ineligible unless Congress extends the program.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has indicated that he wants the program continued, as have Nevada’s other Democratic members of Congress, who all supported the Recovery Act. Bills are pending before the House and Senate to extend the subsidy.
“With Southern Nevada facing high unemployment, extending the COBRA subsidy will help Nevadans who have lost their job afford health care coverage,” said Andrew Stoddard, a spokesman for Democratic Rep. Dina Titus.
“We need to aid Americans struggling to maintain insurance coverage when they’ve lost a job,” Rep. Shelley Berkley said. “We should work to extend COBRA subsidies for Nevadans and others.”
Nevada’s Republican congressmen, Sen. John Ensign and Rep. Dean Heller, voted against the Recovery Act.
When asked about extending the benefit during a radio show Monday on KXNT 840-AM, Ensign said he was unfamiliar with the pending legislation, but said it is “something we should probably look into, especially for states that have real high unemployment like Nevada.”
Nevada’s unemployment rate was 13 percent in October, second only to Michigan. More than 175,000 Nevadans were unemployed, and of those, 129,700 are in the Las Vegas area.
The Treasury Department, which is compiling information on the number of Americans drawing the COBRA subsidy, could not provide information on how many Nevadans are participating.
Discussion: comments so far…
Comments are moderated by Las Vegas Sun editors. Our goal is not to limit the discussion, but rather to elevate it. Comments should be relevant and contain no abusive language. Comments that are off-topic, vulgar, profane or include personal attacks will be removed. Full comments policy. Additionally, we now display comments from trusted commenters by default. Those wishing to become a trusted commenter need to verify their identity or sign in with Facebook Connect to tie their Facebook account to their Las Vegas Sun account. For more on this change, read our story about how it works and why we did it.
Only trusted comments are displayed on this page. Untrusted comments have expired from this story.
No trusted comments have been posted.
Post a comment
Most Popular
- Viewed
- Discussed
- E-mailed
- Chinese company agrees to finance proposed Henderson arena
- South Point owner Michael Gaughan’s take on ‘Vegas Stripped’: ‘I’ll give it an 8’
- Romney says he prevented Massachusetts from becoming ‘the Las Vegas of gay marriage’
- Coolican: Henderson officials out of loop on police brutality case, raising red flags
- See mug shots of 16 arrested in stolen-property police sting
- UNLV eager to get on the court for big game against San Diego State
- Criss Angel denies allegations of fight with fired employee
- Lumberjacks — ‘Where the Big Boys Eat’ — hiring for North Las Vegas location
- Berkley draws stark contrasts with Heller over immigration
- Conceptual design unveiled for Henderson Space and Science Center
Blogs
The Kats Report
South Point owner Michael Gaughan's take on 'Vegas Stripped': 'I'll give it an 8' (3 Comments)
Author relishes writing the life story of ‘larger-than-life’ Oscar Goodman (3 Comments)
Elsewhere
Landowner: All roads could lead to Uxbridge casino
Revel reveals smoke-free casino opening
Cirque du Soleil show in Sands China casino to close this month
Meet the woman behind Sheldon Adelson
The Kats Report
A sophisticated look at line-moving and dog-show handicapping from Wynn's Johnny Avello
The Sun
Locally owned and independent for more than 50 years.
How about aid for people who can't get health insurance.
Wonderful but the real answer is to get them jobs.
When is Reid, Pelosi and Obama going to REDO the stimulus and get a real jobs program
Oh good. More free money for some. Now let's just take some more from someone else so we can give it in hopes of votes. Sorry, harry, you ruined the economy in these past 3 years running the Senate and we all suffer for your ignorance.
People can get dependent on government assistance and withdrawal, like a drug, becomes a problem.
in fact, all of you from tvegas down, you're all azzzzzzzes.
I'm with neiman on this. When I moved here in 1986, my wife had a debilitating illness and I had to pay the inflated Cobra premiums for an entire year to protect her. Eventually, she found a job where her pre-existing condition was waived, if she signed up for health care in the first month (yes, this was through a group plan). No one helped us then. Now I find I am paying again, but this time it's for those who don't want to take care of this responsibility themselves. Enough is enough.
neiman1
You don't get it. These people who will not be able to afford their COBRA payments and have to drop their insurance - will be going to emergency rooms FOR FREE to get treatment!!! So which would you rather have: insurance companies picking up MOST of the tab or YOU THE TAXPAYER paying a $50,000 hospital bill???
Van_Guard:
My how we soon forget. It's easy to cast that stone when things are going good.
Again - read my post to neiman1. Either people get help with their COBRA payments so they can KEEP their insurance or you will be paying for EVERYONE'S HUGE HOSPITAL AND DOCTOR BILLS!!!
And what "responsibility" is that to take care of themselves? Private Insurance? You admitted yourself you kept the insurance going thru COBRA when your wife became ill. What if you couldn't do that??? What if you couldn't afford the full premiums to keep the COBRA going? (BTW - those inflated premiums are what employers pay FOR THEIR EMPLOYEES; what you pay thru COBRA is what your insurance actually costs).
Instead of thinking the way you do - like why didn't I get help? - you should be thankful that you were able to utilize COBRA at a time when you needed it the most. No private insurance would have covered what your regular insurance company via COBRA would have done in your wife's situation. YOU would STILL be paying off hospital and doctor bills. And your costs for prescription drugs would have been way more than any COBRA premium.
PS And believe me - ALL who are on COBRA would LOVE to have jobs that provide health insurance. And all the government is going to do is extend the reduced premium for 5 months. That's all.
A smarter plan would be to use a health savings account. Have the government subsidize a payment into the account, like $1,000 per person in a family per year, if the family buys a high deductible health insurance policy.
But government isn't the answer, the reason you lose coverage when you lose your job IS BECAUSE of government law.
http://reason.tv/video/show/get-some
http://reason.tv/video/show/how-to-fix-h...
I think some of us just come from different worlds. My wife and I fought for the sunsetting of Social Security all our working lives. Clearly, it is not the responsibility of the government to take care of our retirement planning, nor our health care. When she died, I figured her SS would be significant after paying in for over 20 years. But that was not the case. All I got was around $230 or so and, apparently, the government confiscated the rest and gave it someone else. That is not fair. I'm not against helping those who truly need it, but I do not believe in entitlements, except for perhaps those who are totally disabled and of an adult age or those who were maimed or died protecting this country. I have nothing against loaning money to able bodied citizens who later can pay it back or work their debt by performing public work projects (like maybe building prisons). With respect to the millions of illegals, we should be sending them back or billing their governments for the health care provided by our institutions. It is not my responsibility to pay for them.
van-guard
my condolences on the loss of your wife.
However, the survivor does NOT receive the same amount social security as the deceased person received when alive. If you expected the same amount, you were misinformed. You receive the Social Security Death Benefit and that is all. It is the same with everyone. When my Mom passed away, my Dad received exactly that - $250 - even though my Mom was getting over $900 a month. That is not how Social Security works. You die and the money goes back into the system for those who are still alive which includes you.
It is different, however, with private pension plans.
Nine months and not one of these welfare receivers was allowed to get training for a new career; if they did get training ALL BENEFIT WOULD HAVE BEEN CUT-OFF immediately! Now they will get another nine months of freebies and STILL NO TRAINING ALLOWED(and I don't mean worthless "Life Skills" nonsense and sorting clothes at Goodwill masqueraded as "Job Training").
You are so missing the point of this article. It has NOTHING to do with JOB Training BUT EVERYTHING TO DO WITH CONTINUING YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE FROM YOUR EMPLOYER SPONSORED PLAN AFTER YOU LOST YOUR JOB!!!!
Those of us on COBRA HAD JOBS. We don't need any job training - we need comparable jobs with health insurance again. We are not getting a freebie - the gov't is helping for a LIMITED amount of time. And those who can afford it, will continue to pay the full premium when the gov't subsidy runs out. THAT is when it's going to hurt people. Some people have monthly premiums over a $1000 a month; that's a big chunk of that unemployment money. And trust me when I say ALL of us would rather be working than, God forbid, taking food out of your mouth or money from your stash of gambling money.
Try comprehending what you read the next time and not assume that everyone wants a free ride.
I think for Capitalism to work there needs to be a cushion. People should be motivated to work so they can get better things. The way it has turned out, people need to work just to get treated in case of an emergency? People need to work just to exist? This is not Capitalism. I think the current state in this country is Romanism. And if there isn't a need for you, you can join the military if you qualify, or you're banned from society. Kinda sucks... remembering 2-4 years ago companies were so eager to recruit you..
Great. Next, the taxpayers of America will be asked to pay the premiums on auto insurance, life insurance, homeowner's insurance, and no-telling-what else insurance for deadbeats who can't fend for themselves.