Lawmakers miss key deadline on renewal of federal COBRA subsidy

A facet of the stimulus that subsidized unemployed workers' healthcare premiums ended for many Monday, despite numerous attempts to prevent a rollback of the program.

Lawmakers have wrangled for months over a possible expansion of the Recovery Act's more than $25 billion COBRA subsidy, which covers about 65 percent of jobless Americans' monthly insurance bills for up to nine months.

But the debate over how to extend the program, for how long to extend it and how much the final product might cost has caused lawmakers to overshoot the Nov. 30 deadline, meaning those who enrolled in the program when it first launched will soon lose their subsidies and — perhaps later, lawmakers fear — their insurance coverage.

Consequently, Democrats seem poised to address COBRA coverage in their pending jobs stimulus, but details of how that extension might look remain unclear.

In the meantime, a slew of efforts in both chambers of Congress could extend the program for about six months.

One of those proposals, sponsored by Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), would also open the program's eligibility window to include any worker who lost his or her job between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2010. Currently, only those losing their jobs between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31, 2009 are eligible for the subsidy.

However, Sestak's bill remains lodged in committee, as do a few other, similar efforts in both the House and Senate.

"The effect of this legislation will be especially important to older workers who lost their jobs or were forced to accept early retirement but are not yet eligible for Medicare," Sestak wrote in late October.

"During debate on the Economic Stimulus Bill, I argued, based on the economic modeling, for bolder action," the congressman added. "Instead, the Senate weakened the measure for political reasons — limiting the size of the package and replacing job-creating infrastructure investments with wasteful corporate tax cuts. The result has been nearly 1 million fewer saved or created jobs, and the associated strain on many of the assistance programs included in the legislation."