Today, the Senate reached agreement on one element of the jobs bill that failed yesterday, passing a six-month doc fix by unanimous consent. This delays a 21-percent pay cut to Medicare doctors that would have hit this month until a permanent fix can be agreed upon.
The bad news: that still leaves unemployment benefits and FMAP hanging. The consequences for the real world:
Extended unemployment benefits and subsidies for laid-off workers to buy health insurance also lapsed at the beginning of the month. Since then, 903,000 people who've been out of work for longer than six months have found themselves ineligible for extended benefits originally provided by the 2009 stimulus bill.
"Clearly, the doctors have more lobbyists than the unemployed do," said Judy Conti of the National Employment Law Project. "While I have no objection to doctors being paid at appropriate levels for their skill and important work, this is a prospective solution to a problem that would decrease, not eliminate, their income. Currently, however, the UI programs have lapsed, over 900,000 long-term unemployed workers are without any income right now, and that number grows to 1.2 million next week."
The states are waiting on $24 billion in federal aid to help supplement health costs, the loss of which could mean the loss of 900,000 more jobs. Why? Because of Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Joe Lieberman, and Ben Nelson. Nelson wants to see more offsets. Collins wants to cut out more state aid. Snowe is attached at the hip to Collins, and Lieberman is just an asshole.
A source close to the Hill tells me that as a compromise was being negotiated yesterday to finally pass the full bill, Collins and Snowe agreed to support cloture on the package. But McConnell met with the two of them before the vote and evidently whipped them back in line, possibly playing on Snowe's fear of getting a primary challenge from the Right. Lieberman would likely have voted with Snowe and Collins, making Nelson's opposition irrelevant.
The excuse? The deficit and the supposed clamor from the American people to cut it. I say supposed clamor because it is. Yesterday I wrote about the polling that shows the majority of Americans want spending to help create jobs, and it's more important to them than the long-term deficit outlook. Yglesias followed up on the Gallup poll I wrote about today, putting it very plainly: "People should write laws that involve spending government funds on hiring people to do stuff."
At the very least, they should be writing laws that keep people at work. But at the moment, it's really clear that the allegedly "moderate" and "independent" senators from Maine, with back-up from Nelson and Lieberman, sold out their state because politics are more important than doing what is right.
