On the recordJune 9, 2010
I rise today to speak about the basic issue to have health insurance coverage for those who have been out of work. I know I join Senator Brown and the other cosponsors of this amendment to urge support for the extension of the eligibility period of the COBRA Premium Assistance Program, which was authorized under the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. We continue to recover from this economic recession, a horrific chapter in American history almost too difficult or too complicated for some of us to fully understand because we haven't lived through it ourselves. We in the Senate haven't lost our jobs or lost our health insurance. But we hear from and know of people who have, and that is one of the main reasons we are here to talk about this issue today. We are recovering but we haven't recovered fully, and now is not the time to pull up the ladder on people who are still hanging on, in some cases to the last rung of the ladder. These basic, and I would argue, vital safety net programs--whether it is unemployment insurance or COBRA premium assistance for health care--are programs that we can't short-circuit. We can't cut people off at this point.
