Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi conducts a news conference in the Capitol Visitor Center where she addressed COVID-19 relief, April 30, 2020.
In my On Tap for Monday, I asked why Congress hasn’t made health coverage for unemployed workers any kind of priority. Few such workers can afford the out-of-pocket cost to keep their insurance as permitted under the law known as COBRA.
Since I posed that question, I’ve found some answers—and the story is not pretty. Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, who chairs the House Committee on Education and Labor, has proposed legislation to have the government cover the cost of COBRA coverage during the pandemic. So far, 12.7 million idled workers have lost health coverage, and that number will surely grow.
But despite Scott’s close relationship with Nancy Pelosi as a senior member of the House leadership, his bill is nowhere on Pelosi’s list of priorities for the next relief package.
Donald Taylor, known as D. Taylor, president of UNITE HERE, which represents about 300,000 unionized workers in the hotel and food service industry, many now on layoff, told me, “How could Congress spend $2.7 trillion in a health care crisis and spend not a penny on health care?”
It’s a very good question.
The backstory is a long-standing argument about the future of COBRA. Some legislators and senior Hill staff have argued that the government should pick up COBRA coverage, as it did during the post-2008 recession under Obama’s Recovery Act. Others insist that COBRA is outmoded and that people without insurance should just buy into the Affordable Care Act.
That’s a fair question during normal times, but during a pandemic it’s outrageous for people to lose health coverage. And there are at least ten million other laid-off people who never had health insurance. Does anyone seriously believe they can afford to buy into either the ACA or COBRA? (When you are unemployed, forget the “Affordable” part of the ACA.) The bill has also gotten caught in a crossfire between advocates of single-payer and advocates of piecemeal reform. That’s also a fair argument—but for next year, not during the emergency.
Another part of the backstory is the role of Wendell Primus, a longtime senior Hill staffer on health and other social issues.
I’ve followed Primus on and off for decades, and he’s been a progressive voice some of the time. But Primus has been arguing for years against COBRA subsidies—and even in the current crisis. On this issue, he’s all wet.
[After I wrote this, I heard from Wendell Primus, who insists that health coverage for unemployed workers will be a priority for Pelosi in the next CARES bill; that it was in the original CARES bill, but that the Senate refused to include it. He added that whether to use COBRA or some other means of getting coverage to the unemployed was a question of what’s most cost-effective, and that he had never opposed COBRA as such, and had supported its expansion in the 2009 recession.
If Speaker Pelosi is truly going to bargain hard to get health coverage into the next bill, that’s welcome news. She did not do it last time. As I pointed out in my Monday post, COBRA is a badly flawed measure. The point is not to subsidize COBRA for the sake of COBRA, but to get these nearly 30 million unemployed workers covered one way or another.]
Pelosi needs other, better advice. She has belatedly pushed for state and local aid in the next relief bill, but still hasn’t made insurance subsidies for the unemployed any kind of bargaining priority.
Not only do we need Congress to subsidize COBRA. For the people who never had insurance, now vulnerable to the pandemic, we need to raise the Medicaid income limits, which now max out at 138 percent of the poverty line, to the ACA ceiling of 400 percent of poverty.
“Corporations got trillions,” adds Taylor. “All workers got was 13 more weeks of increased unemployment comp. How can you buy insurance coverage on that?”
You can’t. Over to you, Speaker Pelosi. And you, candidate Biden.
This post has been updated.
