WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Coronavirus crisis is being fought on two fronts: the medical one and the financial one.
On the latter, the Senate passed the second phase of financial relief Wednesday approving the measure passed last week by the house, a multibillion-dollar emergency aid package that would extend unemployment insurance, make Coronavirus testing free coronavirus testing, increased funding for Medicaid and state unemployment insurance, and paid family leave for workers at companies with 500 employees or fewer as well as expanded funding for food security programs which was pushed for by Northeast Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge.
The next phase, is the big one. A trillion dollar plan that reportedly includes $500 billion for Americans based on income and family size that would be paid out in $1,000 checks on April 6 and May 18. It also includes $300 billion to small businesses, $50 billion that would be available in loans to the airlines and $150 billion to prop up the sectors.
Senator Sherrod Brown told News 5 he’s anxious to get to work on that plan. “I was on the floor Monday night talking about sending checks of $2,000 so people can get through these particularly difficult early days at the same time we need to upscale unemployment insurance so people can get it quicker if they're laid off,” he said. “We've got to do all of those things. We are undoubtedly going to go into a recession if we're not already. Forget the stock market for a minute just look what's happening to job layoffs.”
“What we have to do is our job and our job is to help people get sick day pay so that if you're a $12.50 worker and you feel sick you either go to work and maybe infect others or you stay home and you lose the $100 in pay that you were going to get and you then, it makes it harder obviously to pay your rent so we need to fix that, we need to make sure that the people who are put out of work, whether they're United employees or whether they're working at a restaurant or whether they're laid off from some other job that we make them whole otherwise people are not going to be able to make their rent, they can get foreclosed on, they're not able to take care of the kids. All of the things that we need to do to help people that are laid off because of this,” Brown said.
