Before casting the only Republican vote in Congress so far for a health care reform proposal on October 13, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine cautioned that the journey toward final legislation has “miles to go.”

Now the two Senate bills and three in the House have to be combined into one in each chamber. The bills that the Senate and House approve are likely to be divergent and require potentially tense bicameral negotiations. Then each chamber votes again on the product that comes out of conference.

If you need evidence that this process is likely to take weeks, look at the situation with legislation to extend unemployment benefits.

The urgency of the matter is not in question. Congress has acted twice so far during the recession to add up to 53 weeks of unemployment benefits to the normal 26 weeks.

But now unemployment has reached 9.8 percent, and most experts believe it will continue to climb. At a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee last month, witnesses testified that there are about 3 million job openings for 15 million people seeking work.

As of September, nearly 5.4 million people have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, said in an October 15 speech on the Senate floor. Nearly 2 million will exhaust unemployment benefits by the end of the year.

The House approved legislation September 22 that would extend unemployment insurance benefits for an additional 13 weeks for people who live in states with an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent or more.

But when the bill got to the Senate, Shaheen was one of the senators who held it up in order to expand it. New Hampshire’s unemployment rate is lower than 8.5 percent, and Shaheen didn’t want her jobless constituents to be left out.

Shaheen joined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and Sens. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, to introduce a bill October 8 that would extend unemployment benefits for 14 weeks for workers in all 50 states. They would fund for the bill by extending a surtax on employers through June 2011.

They wanted to push the bill through the Senate that day, but Republicans slowed down the process. They said that they hadn’t had a chance to study the measure and wanted an opportunity to introduce amendments.

It looks as if the Senate will act on an unemployment extension during the week of October 19. Among the amendments that Republicans are likely to offer would be one to finance the unemployment extension with money from the $787 billion stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year rather than by increasing taxes on employers.

It’s not certain whether the Republican amendments will succeed, but Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona, said that prospects for action on unemployment extension are “very good.”

Republicans want to have their say in shaping the bill, but it doesn’t look as if they will filibuster it. The political price—when so many Americans are facing long-term unemployment—is too high.

But even an issue that seems to be a slam-dunk has nuances. It’s inaccurate—and heartless—to say that more benefits will enervate the motivation of a jobless person, according to Gary Burtless, the Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Instead, an extension will make the labor market more efficient by allowing the unemployed to “look longer and harder for a job in which their skills will be fully utilized,” Burtless testified at a Senate Finance Committee hearing in September.

But at the same meeting, Douglas Holmes, president of UWC-Strategic Services, argued that federal dollars would be better spent creating sustainable jobs. Extending unemployment is “an inefficient use of funds,” he said in an interview.

“Employment is the goal, not the number of weeks of unemployment,” Holmes said.

Shaheen differed on that point in her October 15 Senate speech.

“It’s the right investment to make in our economy,” she said. “People are counting on us to act now.”

But “now” in the Senate can mean several weeks. Just wait until health care reform gets to the floor.