Good for Joe Sestak for recognizing the problem. Let your congress person know you support the bill, even if you can't afford COBRA yourself. Keeping health coverage on the political radar is an important step towards affordable universal health care:

Laura C. Trueman has spent much of her career promoting affordable health care. Now, she wishes she could find some herself.

Laid off from her marketing job at a managed-care company late last year, Trueman was able to keep her health insurance thanks to a provision in the federal stimulus bill that gave furloughed workers the right to purchase their old employer-based coverage at a 65% discount. The subsidies, which last up to nine months, were designed to give workers like Trueman time to get back on their feet.

Today, with the job market weak, Trueman is still without a job, and her family is bracing for an uncertain future. With the subsidies, she and her husband, a self-employed attorney were paying a manageable $460 a month for their health insurance; starting Dec. 1, the cost jumps to $1,313. They can ill afford the increase. They're already having trouble making their mortgage payment, and fear they might lose their Northern Virginia home.

“It has really made a huge difference for us,” she says of the insurance assistance, adding that the higher payment “would be a real stretch.”

Since 1985, a law known as COBRA has given laid off-workers the right to hold onto their employer-based health insurance for up to 18 months so long as they continue to pay the premiums, including payments that their employers used to make on their behalf.

In the past very few people could afford this option, but the government subsidies have changed that, and now enrollments appear to be growing sharply. Hewitt Associates, a Lincolnshire, Ill., consulting firm, recently estimated that the rate at which workers were opting for coverage under COBRA had doubled compared with pre-subsidy levels.

Although federal officials do not have figures on the number of people participating in the program, millions have been eligible. The law covers anyone laid off between Sept. 1 of last year and Dec. 31 of this year.

But with the first discounts having gone into effect March 1, many people are about to see the benefit expire, including many who remain unemployed. The Obama administration and some members of Congress are talking about whether to extend the subsidy. Some lawmakers aren't enthused because of budget concerns, but backers say the subsidy is a crucial lifeline for people still hunting for jobs.

Just this week, Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Penn., introduced legislation that would extend from 9 to 15 months the total allowable time an unemployed worker and her family could receive the subsidized COBRA assistance. The legislation would also extend the subsidies to people laid off through June 30, 2010, widening the window of eligibility by six months. A third provision would give an extra six months of undiscounted COBRA coverage to people who were laid off early in 2008 before the subsidy law took effect.

I was laid off in July 2007, just before the subsidies kicked in. But at this point, I'd be happy just to be eligible for another six months.

Queen Olympia has decided that the very thing that would make insurance exchanges work is the thing that has to go. And you know when the queen speaks, the Senate listens! (Do you ever get the impression that the Queen is actually wearing no clothes?)

Olympia Snowe looks set to reprise her role in hobbling the stimulus bill in exchange for providing the key pivotal vote for it by killing John Kerry’s amendment, “Empowering State Exchanges to be Prudent Purchasers.” Jon Cohn explains:

In the bills that passed three House committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the exchange would be a “prudent purchaser.” In other words, it would have a staff that bargained with insurers to bring down premiums — and that made sure all plans lived up to strict guidelines for coverage and customer service. In effect, any insurer that wants to offer coverage through the exchanges has to get the equivalent of a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” from the administrators. This is precisely how it works in Massachusetts.

By contrast, the Senate Finance bill envisions much weaker exchanges. Instead of choosing which plans to make available, the exchange administrators would, by law, have to accept any plan that meets a relatively minimal set of standards.

There are several problems with this. One is that it’s going to be a mess for consumers. Another is that it threatens to turn the exchanges into playgrounds of implicit risk-shifting efforts wherein companies try to design policies specifically around dissuading high-need people from signing up. Thus ever-more burden is going to be placed on the untested risk-adjustment machinery that’s supposed to even this all out. Ezra Klein observes that Jon Kingsdale is basically the only person in America’s who’s run anything like the exchanges envisioned in all the different bills—he does the job in Massachusetts—and he views the prudent purchaser rule as absolutely essential. Against that Snowe is pitting, I guess, her intuition that this is too much government involvement.

TNR's Jonathan Cohn lays out his argument here:

The bills moving through Congress all set up exchanges modeled more or less on what Massachusetts has done. But there are a few critical differences. Among the most important is a difference in how the exchanges would select which plans to offer people.

In the bills that passed three House committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the exchange would be a "prudent purchaser." In other words, it would have a staff that bargained with insurers to bring down premiums--and that made sure all plans lived up to strict guidelines for coverage and customer service. In effect, any insurer that wants to offer coverage through the exchanges has to get the equivalent of a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" from the administrators. This is precisely how it works in Massachusetts.

By contrast, the Senate Finance bill envisions much weaker exchanges. Instead of choosing which plans to make available, the exchange administrators would, by law, have to accept any plan that meets a relatively minimal set of standards.

Jon Kingsdale, who runs the Massachusetts exchange, calls that a recipe for "policy disaster," as consumers faced a dizzying array of more expensive, less regulated choices. "It would be like telling your grocery store they have to offer every single kind of bread baked by every single bakery. ... The exchanges would be nothing more than an automated Yellow Pages."

Kingsdale is among several Massachusetts-based policy experts who have been ringing the alarm bells about this flaw in the Finance bill. And it's no coincidence that it's a Massachusetts senator, Kerry, who now proposed to fix it by giving the exchanges the same powers envisioned in the House and HELP bills.

But when Kerry introduced his plan last week, he couldn't get the votes to pass it. The reason, several sources on Capitol Hill say, was opposition from Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican who also sits on Senate Finance. Snowe seems to be concerned that a more aggressive exchange would amount to more government--which, in fact, it would be. But, as Massachusetts has shown, sometimes more government is exactly what health care needs.

Chances are reasonably good that Kerry's vision of reform will prevail, if not during the Senate floor debate then afterwards, when a conference committee merges whatever passes from the two congressional chambers. But it's not a sure thing, which is why this seemingly narrow question deserves a lot more attention.

Exchange design doesn't get the attention of controversies like the public option, abortion, or supposed death panels. In the long run, though, it could be far more decisive in whether reform works.

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Mike Pence with some unfortunate lighting at the Right Online right wing bloggers conference, decrying liberalism for all that's wrong with the United States in the land of Mike Pence's brain. So nice to see Pence is still complaining about that stimulus bill he says didn't work, but wanted more of for his state.

Heather already posted on this segment, but I wanted to make an additional point. When I saw that Mike Pence was getting a full segment by himself I was a little upset because he had the floor to himself on FOX which usually leads to unfiltered right wing talking points becoming gospel and I imagine that's how he viewed it as well. But when Chris Wallace read off a litany of his failings he had no coherent response. He never answered any of the questions and sat there as a true representative of the conservative movement. They are barren of ideas, obstruct all meaningful legislation and have absolutely nothing to add that will try and dig this country out of the hole the Bush administration put us in.

WALLACE: Congressman, isn't the recession leveling off? And doesn't President Obama deserve some credit?

WALLACE: But nobody -- excuse me. Nobody said that the stimulus bill was going to stop the recession.

WALLACE: But I want to ask you about another report, and we're going to put it up on the screen. More than 2,400 people are now at work on federal-stimulus-funded roadway projects in Indiana.

"What's clear is that the stimulus projects have boosted an industry otherwise floundering in Indiana." And that is not from the DNC. That's from the Evansville, Indiana Courier & Press.

WALLACE: First you're saying the stimulus is bad. Now you're saying you're just not getting your fair share of it.

Watch the segment and watch him flail away like an old man trying to hit a 95 mph fastball. He whiffed and looked bad doing it. The conservative mantra of tax cuts alone would not have done anything to fix our problems but only deepened them.
And the cash for clunkers program as Chris Wallace repeatedly brought up has been a big hit, but you'll never get him to admit that.

-- Ford Motor Co. will post its first monthly U.S. sales increase since 2007 as the government’s “cash-for-clunkers” incentives boosted industrywide deliveries of new vehicles to the highest levels of this year.

Details will be released today when Ford joins automakers in announcing July deliveries, said Ken Czubay, the company’s U.S. sales and marketing chief. He disclosed the year-over-year improvement in an interview yesterday without giving specifics.

Industry sales probably ran at an annual rate of more than 10 million autos, 2009’s best showing, after the trade-in credits stoked consumers’ interest, said George Pipas, Ford’s sales analyst. Such a result may indicate a bottom in the market’s worst slump since 1976.

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From The Ed Show April 27, 2009. Ed takes the GOP to task for holding up the nomination of Kathleen Sebelius and for stripping the funding for pandemic flu preparedness from the stimulus package. He also hits Gov. Rick Perry for wanting the CDC to send his state swine flu vaccine just two weeks after his talk of Texas seceding from the union.

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As I often tell myself, there is rarely any situation in which the attentions of the Republican party can't make it even worse. Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest points out one major problem:

We face a potential swine flu pandemic, and we do not have the people in place in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that we need. Why not? The Republicans are blocking confirmation of Obama’s nominee, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

Why are they blocking this nomination? Because Gov. Sebelius won’t approve Kansas Republican bills to block abortion even if the abortion will save the mother’s life. They say she is “an enemy of the unborn,” because she thinks doctors should be able to save the mother’s life.

So as you worry about this possible flu pandemic, think about why your government is not yet fully up and running to do its part and protect us. As we saw when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, government-hating Republicans destroyed our ability to respond to emergencies, and instead set up a system where contracts were awarded to cronies who collected the cash but never delivered the services. And now they continue to block our government’s ability to protect us, because they think that a mother’s life is not as important as a fetus.

The Democrats should start a big public relations push to get the Republicans to drop their opposition for the sake of the country.

It might work, but who knows? After all, Republicans always put party above country. Because guess what the Republicans (including "moderate" Susan Collins, helped along by Karl Rove's attacks) stripped out of the stimulus bill? You guessed it: pandemic flu preparedness! (They insisted it had nothing to do with the economy.) From John Nichols in today's The Nation:

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

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More astroturfing? Sure looks like it to me. From Hardball April 15, 2009. Mike Barnicle questions Mike Pence about why only now the outrage over deficit spending. Pence says that it was the bailout and stimulus bill and claims that this is just a grass roots movement that started in the fall. The other guest John O'Hara claims that this was something that's been boiling up since George Bush was in office. Barnicle then asks O'Hara how he got involved in the protests.

Barnicle: So John I mean clearly you're a young guy....What got you actively involved in this. Give me a little bit about your background. Who are you and why are you involved in this?

O’Hara: Absolutely. I work at a free-market think tank, the Heartland Institute here in Chicago. In my spare time, on weekends and nights, leading up to the Feburary 27th tea parties, my good friend J. P. Freir, he's been on this network, at the American Spectator invited me and asked me if I could help him get some momentum behind having a tea party in front of the White House. We did. We had over 300 people show up. And there were concurrent tea parties across the country that day and ever since then you’ve had thousands come out in Orlando, Cincinati and then today in Chicago we had over 5000 and man more in cities across the country.

Think Progress has more on John O'Hara's "weekend work" organizing these protests. He wasn't really organizing any of this for his employer. He was just spending his time off volunteering. Riiiggtt. Of course Mike Barnicle doesn't ask him why he thinks anyone should believe that.

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From the Cafferty File.

In the Republican response to President Obama’s speech last night, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal called the stimulus package “irresponsible”. He said it will grow government, increase taxes in the future and saddle future generations with debt.

“Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have, on things we do not need? That is precisely what the Democrats in Congress just did,” said Jindal.

Interesting, after the last 8 years, it would seem that Republicans are hardly in a position to lecture anyone about fiscal responsibility. When President Bush took office in 2000, the national debt was about $5.7 trillion dollars, which after two wars and lots of other spending, is now approaching $11 trillion. President Bush ran up more debt for this country than all previous presidents combined.

Jindal acknowledged last night that in recent years, “our party got away from its principles.” No kidding.

Keep in mind, Jindal — who some see as a possible contender for his party’s presidential nominee in 2012 — is one of the Republican governors talking about rejecting stimulus funding for his state. Jindal says he plans to turn down $100 million because it would require his state to change its unemployment laws. I guess when you’re a wealthy state like Louisiana you don’t need no stinking stimulus money.

Here’s my question to you: Are the Republicans in any position to lecture President Obama on fiscal responsibility?

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Bobby Jindal on Meet the Press saying that he would turn down assistance for unemployment benefits from the stimulus package.

MR. GREGORY: All right, but let's focus on--because I want to get to some of those larger issues in just a moment. But let's focus on this. Why would you turn down $100 million for federal unemployment assistance for your state?

GOV. JINDAL: Well, let's look at the programs we turned down.

MR. GREGORY: Yeah.

GOV. JINDAL: You're talking about temporary federal money that would require a permanent change in state law.

MR. GREGORY: But it is--it's a tax break.

GOV. JINDAL: Well, it, it's--no. The $100 million we turned down was temporary federal dollars that would require us to change our unemployment laws. That would've actually raised taxes on Louisiana businesses. We as a state would've been responsible for paying for those benefits after the federal money disappeared.

Matthew Yglesias has some thoughts on why Jindal is doing this in his post Bobby Jindal's Hostages.

My other thought is that there may be a “beggar thy neighbor” strategy going on here. If Louisiana makes its unemployment benefits less generous than what’s available in other states, then maybe unemployed citizens will leave Louisiana for Texas and other neighboring states, thus creating an artificial appearance of an improved economic situation. It would be the equivalent of Mike Bloomberg fighting poverty by demolishing all the low-income housing in New York and hoping the poor people all move elsewhere.

It's hard to say whether that might be true or not but since that was pretty well the response to Hurricane Katrina nothing would surprise me from the Republicans. The other possibility is that Ray Nagin is right and it's Jindal putting his presidential ambitions before the interest of his state. Not that I'm any fan of Ray Nagin but I'd have a lot of trouble disagreeing with him on this point and that it isn't just all politics for Jindal.

Full transcript to follow.

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It's good to have dreams and aspirations, isn't it? Too bad that the Republican party's aspirations appear to be centered on destroying the country. After two decades of nearly unfettered access to run the nation, the Republicans are trying their damndest to obstruct and torpedo the stimulus bill and any success that President Obama might have.

And they actually think this will win them supporters. Astonishing. Even David Frum, who hasn't seen a really bad idea he wouldn't cheerlead, as long as it came out of the mouth of a Republican, thinks the GOP is "brain dead".

Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) goes on FOX News and vows that the Republican Party will cancel the stimulus bill if they retake the majority in 2010.

All I can tell you, buddy, is that you just keep talking like that. Keep proving how out of touch with what's really happening with Americans right now. Keep showing how petty and petulant and how you place party over country. We'll see about that majority in 2010 with that attitude.

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David Frum came on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with David Shuster and took the GOP to task for their theatrics in opposition to the stimulus bill. Apparently Frum isn't too impressed with the hissy fits he's seen them throwing on the House and Senate floors. But here's the trouble with his argument. What does Frum think are the very serious solutions that the GOP should be offering as their substantive policy solutions to our economic woes? More tax cuts. Um..I think they did offer that up David, and got some of them in the bill and as Ian Welsh over at Firedoglake notes, those tax cuts are not what we need to get us out of this hole we're in.

A Stimulus Bill With 40% Tax Cuts Won't Do the Job

What's brain dead is doing the same thing over and over again and thinking you're going to get a different outcome. It does warm my heart a bit to see these guys eating their own and someone actually calling out the Republicans in the Senate and the House for acting like drama queens.

From Face the Nation Feb. 15, 2009 on the stimulus bill and executive compensation.

As predicted, House and Senate Republicans on Friday maintained their unified front in turning their backs on President Obama's economic recovery package. As it turns out, Obama wasn't the first Democrat to learn the hard way that bipartisanship is a one-way street for the GOP when it comes to the economy. In 1993, Bill Clinton's $496 billion stimulus and deficit-cutting program passed without a single Republican vote. But in 1981 and again in 2001, substantial numbers of Democrats acquiesced in backing regressive Reagan and Bush tax cuts which, also as predicted, drained the federal treasury.

The table above tells the tale. (Note that figures are not in real dollars adjusted for inflation.) While some turncoat Democrats helped Reagan and Bush sell their supply-side snake oil, Republicans then as now were determined to torpedo new Democratic presidents.

Obama's margins in the passage of the final $787 billion conference bill were almost unchanged from the earlier versions produced by the House and Senate. Despite the claim by Minority Whip and Newt Gingrich Mini-Me Eric Cantor four weeks ago that Obama's bipartisan outreach was a "very efficient process," the President was shut out again by Republicans in the House. In the Senate, the stimulus actually lost ground, as Ted Kennedy's absence and the no-vote of aborted Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg made the final tally 60-38. So much for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's January statement that the Obama stimulus proposal "could well have broad Republican appeal." Still, their opposition to the bill didn't prevent Republicans like John Mica (FL) and Don Young (AK) from claiming credit for projects it will fund in their districts.

If Barack Obama's experience with Republican obstructionism has been painful, Bill Clinton's was unprecedented. When Clinton's 1993 economic program scraped by without capturing the support of even one GOP lawmaker, the New York Times remarked:

Historians believe that no other important legislation, at least since World War II, has been enacted without at least one vote in either house from each major party.

Inheriting massive budget deficits and unemployment topping 7% from Bush the Elder, Clinton's $496 billion program was nonetheless opposed by every single member of the GOP, as well as defectors from his own party. As the Times recounted, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Al Gore to earn victory:

An identical version of the $496 billion deficit-cutting measure was approved Thursday night by the House, 218 to 216. The Senate was divided 50 to 50 before Mr. Gore voted. Since tie votes in the House mean defeat, the bill would have failed if even one representative or one senator who voted with the President had switched sides.

But while Bill Clinton met with total opposition from Republicans, neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush was similarly subjected to scorched-earth politics from Democrats.

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In the Russert days of Meet the Press, the Bush administration knew that it was the best venue for them to "catapult the propaganda" without taking those pesky follow-up questions or provide context. New host David Gregory didn't appear to be much of an improvement--at least when the administration in power were Republicans. Of course, now that the White House is inhabited with Democrats, Gregory seems to have found a journalistic need to question federal plans, even if it means reaching back to Republican talking points that were thoroughly debunked...by NBC colleague Keith Olbermann.

Gregory asked Senior White House Advisor David Axelrod about the part of the stimulus bill that will allegedly give the government the right to dictate medical practices to doctors, a outright fabrication conceived by Betsy McCaughey and furthered in the mainstream media by Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh. Heather did a post on Olbermann's dismantling of this particularly disingenuous slur against the stimulus bill at Video Cafe.

But even after his own network shows the falsity of the charge, Gregory still asks Axelrod to defend it...Hmmm...where is Gregory getting his sourcing for such a pathetic attempt at being a journalist? Drudge and Limbaugh? David, do you realize what this says about your credibility?

By the way, Betsy McCaughey has gone on record challenging Olbermann to debate her. While that isn't his typical format, I would so love to see that...

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During a discussion on how the stimulus bill got passed where Chris Matthews wants to frame the discussion on whether there was a "win" or a "loss" for President Obama, Andrew Sullivan calls out the GOP for their hyprocrisy on when they're concerned about fiscal responsibility.

Matthews: The Republicans have taken a rather unusual position here. Well maybe not unusual but certainly a stark one Andrew. They're voting "No". That's a bet.

Sullivan: They're also saying "We are the party of fiscal conservatism". Now they managed....

Matthews: Since when though?

Sullivan: I think like ten minutes ago. I mean they spent for future debt of this country, they added thirty trillion dollars in a period of boom. We are now in the swiftest down turn in employment in decades and they're quibbling over something like four hundred billion dollars worth of spending. It doesn't make any sense. The hyprocrisy of these people, their ability to turn on a dime and not even acknowledge their own responsibility. If they hadn't spent the amount they spent in the last eight years we wouldn't have this crisis in the sense we'd have much more leeway to spend our way out a recession.

The one moment you don't want to be a fiscal conservative is when the global economy is headed down into a down draft. And yet that's the one moment these Republicans pick to allegedly stand up for their principles. It's insane I think and frankly all these news cycle spins, that's the old politics. The new politics is we're in a terrible economic crisis. Have we done enough to get ourselves out of it?