All eyes are on the Senate Finance Committee today, as Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) formally introduces his long-awaited health care reform bill. Yesterday, however, the committee took some time to focus on another pressing concern: unemployment.  And the results were encouraging.

After holding a hearing on the options available to support the nation's unemployed, Baucus said Congress should act quickly to further extend unemployment benefits. The Detroit News has more:

"It's a major problem, the number of people who are unemployed," said Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "We are going to act in the best way we possibly can." [...]

Baucus said he expects to prepare legislation for a full Senate vote but expects the House to pass its version first and send it to the Senate.

Baucus should have support in his own caucus. Both Sens. Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer, the second and third ranking Democrats in the upper chamber, are backing the extension as well. "We need to be honest about this," Durbin told reporters yesterday, "we had hoped the economy would turn around, it has not come as far as we want it to."

During her testimony (PDF) before the committee, the National Employment Law Project's Beth Shulman highlighted the depth of the nation's recession and explained why continued unemployment insurance will help jumpstart a recovery and protect the long-term unemployed. Here's an excerpt:

Never in the history of the nation’s unemployment insurance program have more workers been unemployed for such prolonged periods of time. A total of five million Americans have been unemployed for six months or more (a record since data started being recorded in 1948). That represents an unprecedented 33.3 percent of all unemployed workers, a share that has never been reached before in any post-war recession. There are now a whopping 5 million Americans who have been out of work for six months, up from just 1.31 million before the recession began in December 2007.

Over the next few weeks, the legislation to watch in the House is H.R. 3404, which would provide an additional 13 weeks of coverage in states  -- like Illinois -- that are experiencing unemployment rates of 9 percent or higher.