WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Republicans haven’t extended health and pension benefits for 16,000 retired miners for a full year because they couldn’t find other cuts to pay for it, a spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan acknowledged Tuesday.

But that explanation isn’t satisfying advocates for the retired miners who wanted more than a four-month extension in the spending bill passed Friday. 

“It just prolongs the agony,” said Carl Shoupe, a retired coal miner and leader of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which has been pushing for more stable funding for the health and pension plans.

As part of stopgap spending bills approved last week, Congress extended the benefits, which were set to expire at the end of the year, until April.

The government in 1946 agreed in a deal with union leaders to guarantee pension and health benefits for miners. But with the coal industry’s decline, the benefits fund supported by mining companies has shrunk and is set to run out of money at the end of the month.

With the extension, the retirees still face losing benefits – in a few months.

“They’re very much on edge. This is ruining their holiday season,” Shoupe said.

“They have arthritis, breathing problems. You have to realize how much stress and strain their bodies went through all those years mining coal,” he said.

At the center of the debate has been Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., whom the United Mine Workers blamed for blocking a previous attempt to put the plans on more solid ground. The union opposed McConnell in the 2014 elections.

In the days leading to the vote, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth delivered a petition with more than 6,000 signatures to McConnell’s Washington office demanding long-term funding for the plans.

McConnell urged senators to approve the four months of funding, which will cost $45 million, despite an attempt by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to block its passage without a guarantee of a full year’s worth of money.

McConnell has said the stop-gap funding was the best that could be done.

“My request to the House was to fund it for a full year, but we’ll be back at it in April, and I think it’s highly unlikely it will be taken away,” he said on the Senate floor.

McConnell’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Penn, said in a statement Monday that he’d “appealed directly to Speaker Ryan to include a solution to this health benefits problem in the government funding bill.”

Ryan’s spokeswoman, AshLee Strong, confirmed that to the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill. She said in an email that Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., also pushed for more funding.

A pension bailout was opposed by conservative groups including the Heritage Foundation. Funding the benefits would “encourage employers, unions and pension fund trustees to promise substantial pension benefits to their employees without setting aside the funds to pay for those benefits,” wrote Rachel Greszler, an analyst for the foundation, in a blog post in September.

However, House Republicans would not detail why a solution couldn’t be found.

McKinley, who is sponsoring a bill to create long-term funding for the benefits, was not available for comment Monday or Tuesday of this week.

He said in a statement, “It’s disappointing to see only a short-term extension of benefits at this time.”

But, he added, the four-month extension “has now given us a chance to fight another day.”

McKinley said he spoke with incoming House Appropriations Chairman. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., who committed to working toward a long-term solution. Frelinghuysen’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Evan Jenkins, R-W.Va., who pushed for longer-term funding, also was unavailable for an interview. He said in a statement, “A promise made should be a promise kept” for retirees.

He pledged to continue to pursue funding.

A spokeswoman for Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., who is stepping down as Appropriations Committee chairman, would not discuss why House members couldn’t find money.

Rogers spokeswoman Danielle Smoot referred to his remarks on the House floor last Thursday, when he said, “Miners have worked hard their entire lives to earn these benefits, and they deserve to know that the promises made to them while working day in and day out in the mines will be honored.”

Shoupe, with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, wasn’t giving McConnell credit on Tuesday.

“He could have taken care of this if he really wanted to,” he said.

The mine workers union doesn’t have the clout it once did, he said. And it probably hurt the cause among House Republicans that the money would have helped union workers.

For all the campaign talk about being concerned about miners and the beneficiaries of the fund, Shoupe said, “They really don’t care about the poor widows and World War II veterans back in D.C.”

Kery Murakami is the Washington, D.C. reporter for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Contact him at kmurakami@cnhi.com