Rebecca Moss2021-02-11T11:16:09-05:00February 5, 2021|
Pandemic unemployment benefits are a lifeline for more than four hundred thousand Pennsylvanians. But payments stalled this year.
By Rebecca Moss, Spotlight PA
Sandra Huffman was cleaning St. Luke’s hospital in Quakertown, gloved and maskless, when she got sick last March. It felt as though a film of spiderwebs had caked her throat, she said. At fifty-four, she was sleeping upright in bed, breathing through a borrowed nebulizer, and drinking an old family remedy of fat Spanish onions congealed in sugar.
She sold her ’86 Chevy Mallard RV, then her mother’s gold jewelry. By late summer she was collecting cans for scrap metal. Huffman did not know that a federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, administered by the state, would provide money for people such as her until October.