NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- One government response to the subprime mortgage crisis is up and running and on track to help a significant number of borrowers avoid losing their homes.

The Federal Housing Authority's FHASecure program offers refinancing options to move delinquent hybrid ARM borrowers into reasonable, fixed-rate loans. It should help about 250,000 home owners through 2008, according to Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman, Steve O'Halloran. FHA is part of HUD.

The program launched August 31 as delinquency filings were soaring. About were filed, nearly double the total of October 2006, according to the latest data from RealtyTrac.

Those numbers are likely to increase. Interest rates on hybrid adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) are set to reset at a record pace of about $362 billion in 2008, according to Banc of America Securities.

The resets will push monthly mortgage payments higher for many borrowers and put 2.2 million of them in jeopardy of losing their homes through 2008, according to the Center for Responsible Lending.

FHASecure can minimize the impact of higher interest rates on borrowers whose ARM loans have already reset. Instead of a borrower's interest jumping from, say, 7 percent to 10 percent, which would mean a typical payment increase of several hundred dollars a month, an FHASecure loan might drop the interest rate back to 7 percent, and it would never go up.

In a speech Monday, HUD secretary Alphonso Jackson, reported that 33,000 borrowers have already refinanced their subprime ARMs into fixed-rate, FHASecure loans. An additional 20,000 are in the pipeline for approval this month, bringing the total to more than 53,000 in four months.

But to John Taylor, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a consumer rights group, "That's just scratching the surface."

Even using HUD's own statistics, FHA will only solve the problems of about a tenth of all the borrowers facing foreclosures through the end of 2008. "We were one of the first to support the use of FHA. I'm not pooh-poohing the program, but let's not overstate its impact," Taylor said.

First off, not all subprime ARM borrowers are eligible for FHASecure loans.

FHASecure targets owners whose mortgages have gone delinquent due to the increase in payments after interest rates have reset. Since that doesn't happen for at least two years for most hybrid ARM loans, those written after December 31, 2006 will not qualify for the program.

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