Study: Millions to Prematurely Lose Unemployment Benefits

[Mass]

After COBRA subsidies expired at the end of last month, in a virtually total silence, here is another protection for the unemployed that could expire, if Congress does not take action quickly. Happy to see that Reid and Hoyer have that in their radar, but with so many things on the table and Republican obstructionism, this is frightening at the least for these families.

http://washingtonindependent.com/69933/study-millions-to-prematurely-lose-unemployment-benefits

Study: Millions to Prematurely Lose Unemployment Benefits
Federal Program Set to Expire in December
For millions of unemployed workers, the recession is poised to go from bad to worse.

More than 3.2 million laid-off Americans will prematurely exhaust their unemployment insurance in the first quarter of next year unless Congress intervenes, an advocacy group warned Monday.

Although lawmakers last month pushed through a new extension of emergency jobless benefits, the underlying program authorizing those payments expires at the end of December. The deadline threatens to leave millions of families dangling without income, even in cases when they’re otherwise eligible to receive additional assistance.

...

The push arrives just weeks after President Obama signed into law a bill extending jobless benefits for 14 weeks nationwide, with an additional six weeks going to residents in those states where unemployment rates top 8.5 percent. It marked just the latest in a series of benefit extensions dating back to the Bush administration. The underlying program was last authorized through Dec. 31 by the economic stimulus bill. Yet, because of the tiered nature of the various extensions — and because beneficiaries must exhaust one tier before applying for the next — the year-end deadline would prevent many eligible families from filing for the next level of benefits.

Hardest hit would be California, where the filing deadline threatens to drop nearly 589,000 beneficiaries in the first three months of next year, according to the analysis, conducted by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), an advocacy group. Other states in line to suffer the greatest drop-offs are Florida (314,000), New York (239,000), Texas (196,000), Illinois (193,000) and Michigan (183,000). Ten states are facing dropped enrollment topping 100,000 beneficiaries, NELP found
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Democrats have the problem on their radar. Last month, the office of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) acknowledged that Congress would have to tackle the deadline glitch before year’s end. More recently, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said that extending unemployment benefits is “critically important to keeping Americans from falling right through the bottom of the barrel.”

“They are still hurting,” Hoyer told reporters last week, “but was of great assistance to them. We need to revisit that, obviously, before the end of the year.”
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[prolesunited]

1. I have confidence that they will fix this before the end of the year

Why would they have extended benefits in the first place if they did not want them extended into the new year?