“It’ll be big” is how speaker Nancy Pelosi described the next coronavirus bill being discussed in the House of Representatives. Yet on Tuesday, when House Democrats unveiled the HEROES Act, their primary proposal to provide health care was to subsidize COBRA payments for the unemployed.

This is yet another example of the Democratic Party thinking small, subsidizing a horrific industry, and condemning people to suffer at the hands of a morally unjustifiable health care system.

COBRA is shorthand for a Reagan-era law allowing people to stay on their employer’s health insurance plan for a certain number of months after they lose their jobs. The issues it attempted to confront — the fact that health insurance options for working-age adults were quite limited, expensive, and generally subject to incredibly onerous underwriting — were what the Affordable Care Act (ACA) attempted to deal with. The ACA should have rendered COBRA unnecessary, but it is still too expensive, and shopping for health insurance is a uniquely American nightmare.