Via ProPublica, the Miami Herald’s John Dorschner reports on the shortfalls of COBRA, the federal and state government program to help the recently unemployed get health insurance. Some of this terrain was covered in an excellent Wall Street Journal piece last week by Ianthe Jeanne Dugan: Under the stimulus bill, the Dept. of Labor temporarily subsidizes 65 percent of the premium costs for the recently unemployed to stay with their former employer’s health insurance provider. One problem with COBRA is that even paying just the remaining 35 percent of the premium is too much for many people. Another is that COBRA is limited to employees who worked for companies with 20 or more employees.

What the Herald adds is that states like Florida have expanded COBRA to cover laid off employees at companies with fewer than 20 workers. But insurance providers — nervous that the deficit-wracked state will not come through with their share of the monthly payment — are not helpful in providing COBRA-subsidized coverage. The Herald uses the example of someone cut off from COBRA because they were literally two cents short on their monthly premium payment.

The problems with implementing COBRA, of course, cry out for the very comprehensive health care reforms that the Obama administration has spent nearly a year trying to enact. However, overall health care reforms (if passed by Congress) won’t take place until 2014. The unemployment crisis is now and the federal government has, at best, an uneven system of assisting with health care for the fifteen million or so unemployed.

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