Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

WASHINGTON — State labor officials and worker advocates appealed on Monday for quick Congressional action to extend emergency jobless benefits and to renew health insurance subsidies for the long-term jobless.

Prolonged unemployment insurance, passed this year in the stimulus act, expires this month, and an estimated one million workers will see benefits end in January if Congress does not act.

The health subsidies, under which the federal government pays 65 percent of insurance costs under Cobra for up to nine months, have expired and are not available to the newly unemployed.

Renewal this month of both forms of aid is “a moral imperative,” Sandi Vito, the secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, said Monday at a news conference here. Ms. Vito said the extensions were needed “through at least the end of 2010 as a bridge for people.”

Congressional aides said in interviews that renewing the aid programs had bipartisan support.

Democratic Congressional leaders are considering adding the measures to a spending bill for government operations before the end of the month. But prospects are uncertain in the Senate, which is dealing with the health care overhaul and where there is disagreement over how long any extensions should last.

Another year of extended benefits and aid for health insurance would cost about $100 billion, officials estimate.

State officials said that any gaps in the program would have disastrous effects on people who are on the edge of foreclosure or eviction. It would also cause serious administrative burdens for state agencies, resulting in delays for applicants, said David Socolow, New Jersey’s commissioner of labor and workforce development.

While unemployment declined in last week’s report, to 10 percent, more than 15 million people remained unemployed in October and 36 percent of them had been jobless more than six months.

Prof. Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard University, said that with so many without jobs for so long, “people have depleted their savings and exhausted the help of relatives.”

Douglas Holmes, president of UWC, which represents businesses on unemployment insurance and compensation issues, said his group was “not opposed to some further extension,” but cautioned against adding burdens on employers.

The first 26 weeks of unemployment benefits are paid by the states with money collected from employers. This year Congress added several extensions, bringing the potential total to 99 weeks in many states.

But without Congressional action, people who lost their jobs after July 1, for example, would receive no federally paid extensions once their customary six months of state aid ran out.

In January alone, benefits would halt for more than one million unemployed people, according to projections by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group and a co-sponsor of Monday’s news conference.