Democrats blocked the effort, however, and Speaker Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, responded with their own proposal that would double the size of Mr. McConnell’s:

They, too, called for an additional $250 billion in small-business loans, but with stricter conditions on how and to which businesses they would be granted.

They also proposed $100 billion to provide hospitals with testing and personal protective equipment, $150 billion for state and local governments, and a 15 percent increase to the maximum Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefit (also known as food stamps.)

But Mr. McConnell returned the favor of blocking that proposal, which means small businesses, hospitals, local governments and SNAP recipients will have to wait until lawmakers can negotiate in person. That may be just as well for Governors Andrew Cuomo and Larry Hogan, who say states and territories need at least $500 billion in federal aid, not $150 billion.

Fixing the health insurance mess

In the United States, roughly half the population relies on employers for health insurance. As the fraught saying goes, “If you like your employer-based plan, you can keep it.” But if a pandemic costs you your job, the only thing you keep is the pandemic.

With millions of Americans now losing their coverage, Ella Nilsen reports at Vox that Democrats have introduced a plan to increase subsidies for COBRA, a program that allows laid-off employees to continue buying into their plans. As Ms. Nilsen explains, COBRA is prohibitively expensive, “but if more people are able to access it with these extra subsidies, it could possibly help fill a large gap in insurance coverage.”

The benefit of this plan is that it allows for relatively seamless continuity of coverage, and “getting unemployed workers onto COBRA can happen very quickly,” Larry Levitt, the senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Ms. Nilsen.

But as the health care policy analyst James Medlock points out, COBRA subsidies are also an expensive solution, since they effectively function as a transfer of public money to for-profit insurers. And, as the writer Molly Crabapple notes, if you didn’t have employer-sponsored insurance before the pandemic, COBRA won’t help you.

Another way to prevent the number of uninsured from skyrocketing is to expand Medicaid, as Senator Doug Jones has proposed. Others have called for lowering the eligibility age of Medicare to 0 (effectively enacting a version of Medicare for all).