There's a basic economic reality that escapes politicians in election years: It takes money in consumers' hands to buy things which then creates demand for more things to be made which then creates jobs which put money in the pockets of consumers which they use to buy things.

In other words, if people don't have money, they won't spend money. Seems simple enough.

But it's an election year, which means the deficit hawks have swooped down upon our politicians and stolen their brains (and, evidently, their ability to read).

Huffington Post reports on a recent survey conducted by the National Unemployment Law Project. The results aren't a huge surprise: 74% of respondents believe extensions to unemployment insurance and COBRA subsidies take priority over deficit reduction.

Three-quarters of registered voters think Congress should forget about the deficit and preserve extended unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for laid-off workers, according to a new poll commissioned by the National Employment Law Project.

Citing deficit concerns, Democrats in both chambers of Congress have said it's time to start thinking about how to wrap up the extended unemployment benefits put in place to fight the recession. But 74 percent of people surveyed said they agreed with the statement that "it is too early to start cutting back benefits and health coverage for workers who lost their jobs."

Let's think through what happens when those '99ers' don't have their unemployment check. Do they rush right out to the local McDonald's and get a counter job? Well, no. Not that they wouldn't if they could, but because they are unlikely to be hired, particularly if their experience is in a different area or they are over age 50. Depending on their skills, self-employment might be an option, but only if they have the means to live while building an income stream.

And then there's the COBRA subsidy, which should be extended for the unemployed until the subsidies available to insureds under health care reform kick in. Losing that will simply cause more medical bankruptcies, more deaths, and more poverty.

This is not the time for Congress to kick the floor out from under the unemployed. We neither asked for, nor did we invite being laid off, downsized, or merged out of existence. We are not lazy, bloodsucking maggots intent on undermining the American way of life. We are real people with real children and real concerns who also happen to vote.

That voting thing is going to be really important in November. Don't be fooled by the press meme about incumbent hate. Incumbents who stand up for the people will be re-elected. Those who don't, won't.

I don't think this mean old snake is used to being under the gun like this. I'm glad it's finally over:

Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R-Ky.) one-man filibuster ended on Tuesday.

Bunning agreed to stop blocking legislation to extend benefits and COBRA health plan subsidies to the unemployed after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) agreed to allow him a vote on an amendment to pay for the $10 billion bill.

It’s the same deal Bunning was offered last week, but Bunning at the time decided to continue his fight. He’d been holding up an extension of the benefits since Thursday.

However, 205,000 households will now face delays in their unemployment checks. Thanks, Jim!

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.

Health care activists confront Horizon BCBSNJ Executive Tom Rubino outside Horizon headquarters in Newark NJ.

I was interested in this story, not the least because, well, this is my COBRA carrier and Horizon's crazy reimbursement rates are the reason why my doctor was kicked out of their network. But really, it could be anybody's insurer. (Oh, and please: If you're having a problem like this with an insurer, call your congressman's office. They usually have a staffer who does nothing but handle insurance problems for constituents.)

BAYONNE, N.J. -- One February morning, a courier arrived at the front desk of Bayonne Medical Center, trying to get to a patient's bedside. His mission: to deliver a letter from New Jersey's dominant health insurer warning that the patient would face a huge hospital bill if he did not leave right away.

Hospital security guards stopped the courier -- and 13 others who came soon after -- before they reached patients' rooms. But then came the faxes and, after that, the letters mailed to patients' doctors and homes. Told that her health plan would not pay for her to stay in the hospital, a 35-year-old social worker named Lisa with a severe lung infection was so unnerved that, tethered to an IV pole dripping antibiotics into her arm, she began to pack her gym bag before a staff member coaxed her back into bed.

The hardball tactics being used to pry patients from their sickbeds illustrate the colliding financial interests that pervade U.S. health care. It is a tug of war over where patients are treated, who decides how much care they receive and -- fundamentally -- which parts of the health-care industry gain or lose when people become ill.

The battle playing out in Bayonne has particular relevance as Congress tries to rewrite the rules that govern health care nationwide -- with hospitals, insurers, doctors and other stakeholders descending on Capitol Hill to angle for advantage. The bills before the House and the Senate would shift the system's balance of power that has evolved over decades -- a balance at the core of the dispute here.

Yet the fight over hospital patients in this working-class enclave also hints at the limits of what federal health-care changes would accomplish; none of the bills would legislate away the specific business practices that have escalated into a full-scale brawl between the city's only hospital and New Jersey's largest health insurer, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield. Lawsuits are flying in both directions, each side accusing the other of fraud, greed and underhanded behavior that harms consumers and increases medical costs. Bayonne accuses Horizon of harassing patients and not paying its bills. Horizon accuses Bayonne of price-gouging and interfering with its health plans.

Such a sharp clash of self-interests is evidence that President Obama may have been naive in suggesting early on that health care's stakeholders are now willing to set aside rivalries that have thwarted previous attempts at reform, said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University who led a state commission on New Jersey's shaky hospital finances. "It's no different from Iraq with all the different tribes. . . . 'How does it affect the money flow to my interest group?' " he said. "They are all sitting in the woods with their machine guns, waiting to shoot."

In such a tense climate, Bayonne has become virtually the only hospital in the country that has withdrawn in protest from the "provider networks" of every major insurer, abandoning a tradeoff that has become a staple of the health-care system: Hospitals agree to be paid lower rates in exchange for knowing that insurers will steer patients to their beds. Bayonne is not, however, the only hospital at odds with Horizon. Four others have pulled out Horizon's network or are close to leaving.

Boy, if Obama manages to pull this off despite the inevitable Republican opposition (and that of the Democratic Blue Dog caucus), it will make a huge difference to the unemployed. I've been paying $500 a month for COBRA coverage since I was laid off last year and I can afford maybe two more months before the money runs out:

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are considering major expansions of government-assisted health care insurance and unemployment compensation as they begin intensive work this week on a two-year economic recovery package.

One proposal, as described by Democratic advisers, would extend unemployment compensation to part-time workers, an idea that Congressional Republicans have blocked in the past.

Other policy changes would subsidize employers’ expenses for temporarily continuing health insurance coverage to laid-off and retired workers and their dependents, as mandated under a 22-year-old federal law known as Cobra, and allow workers who lose jobs that did not come with insurance benefits to be eligible, for the first time, to apply for Medicaid coverage.

We'll let Michelle Malkin debunk herself on the issue of health care and and her attacks on the Frost family. I hope with some deep reflection she can come to grips with her callousness: (from 08/24/04)

After my husband quit his job earlier this year (to become a full-time stay-at-home dad), we had a choice. We could either buy health insurance from his former employer through a program called COBRA at a cost of more than $1,000 per month(!) or we could go it alone in Maryland’s individual market. Given our financial circumstances, that “choice” wasn’t much of a choice at all.

We had to go on our own. We discovered that the most generous plans in Maryland’s individual market cost $700 per month yet provide no more than $1,500 per year of prescription drug coverage–a drop in the bucket if someone in our family were to be diagnosed with a serious illness. With health insurance choices like that, no wonder so many people opt to go uninsured.

Oppps. Barbara O'Brien responds:

What they haven’t yet realized is that if they face a medical disaster similar to what the Frost family went through, their insurer will drop them like a hot calabasa unless state regulations say otherwise.

TREX has much more...

The WSJ editorial board has jumped in and called the Malkinites: "The Internet Mob"

Unfortunately, that narrative was bolstered this week by some conservative bloggers. After the Schip veto, Democrats chose a 12-year-old boy named Graeme Frost to deliver a two-minute rebuttal. While that was a political stunt, the Washington habit of employing "poster children" is hardly new. But the Internet mob leapt to some dubious conclusions and claimed the Frost kids shouldn't have been on Schip in the first place. As it turns out, they belonged to just the sort of family that a modest Schip is supposed to help.

EJ Dionne, Jr: Meanies And Hypocrites