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Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

More Than 230,000 Lose Unemployment Benefits in Eight States Due to Cuts

Author:    
Source:     Daily Kos
Publication Date:     Mon May 14, 2012 at 01:03 PM PDT
 Link: More Than 230,000 Lose Unemployment Benefits in Eight States Due to Cuts
Stephan:   Not much is being made of this, but it represents a cost of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in additional publicly funded expenses because those individuals who have now lost their unemployment benefits will not get proper medical attention, so their small problems will become chronic or life threatening illnesses treated in last resort emergency rooms. It means an increase in hungry children, increased homelessness. Like so many of our toxic nasty-minded conservative social policy decisions we save pennies to ultimately spend hundreds if not thousands. It is worth noting that in those 'socialist' states, say Scandinavia, where they make national wellness a priority they save billions in public costs because they deal with these problems at the cheap end.

More than 230,000 people stopped being eligible for unemployment insurance benefits over the weekend-not because they got jobs, but because the emergency extended benefits program providing their benefits was cut as part of the payroll tax deal earlier this year. The number of weeks of benefits available in states drop as unemployment drops, which hit California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas on Saturday.

While ‘as unemployment drops’ may make this sound like good news, consider that California, where 100,000 jobless people will no longer be getting unemployment insurance, has an unemployment rate of 11 percent. Nationally, more than 5 million people have been unemployed for six months or longer, and there are 3.4 job-seekers for every job opening.

That makes things especially hard for people like Jennifer Moss, a divorced mother of three who has been unemployed since October 2010:

Since losing her job, Moss said she’s applied for countless jobs and had maybe 10 job interviews, but nothing has worked out.

‘There are many sleepless nights where at 2 or 3 in the morning I might be on a website … applying for jobs,

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