Quote:
Originally Posted by tripin_billie
This is really quite wrong. About 12% of insured Americans will experience a gap in coverage during a year. That expands out to about 20% when you look over a 2 year period.
COBRA is often cost-prohibitive for those who just lost their insurance.
Employer based health insurance is a remnant of a tax loophole that employers used during WWII to be able to pay more than the compensation caps set to prvent rampant inflation due to the labor shortages created by sending millions of young workers to war. It was never something thought out or planned. It is not a "system."
Health insurance is a financial product and increasingly, it's a poor product. You wouldn't buy car insurance with the gaps in coverage tor deductibles that health insurance often includes.
Some sources for this:
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/pub...iennial-survey
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/b...y-finkelstein/ |
You clearly didn’t read my first post, where I specifically noted that COBRA was very expensive. There are only a few very specific cases where COBRA makes sense. As I’ve stated multiple times, you would only really use it after you got laid off, and you had a medical event and needed coverage retroactively. Otherwise, you would be using a marketplace health plan which is much more cost effective, and if you are a low income earner, quite cheap. If you don’t have a medical event, then yes, you technically experience a “gap in coverage”, but you didn’t have a medical event, so it doesn’t really matter.
Again, I’m not saying the system is good, or that it doesn’t need substantial improvement, I was just responding to a post that said that when you get laid off, you lose your coverage immediately and you’re basically screwed unless you find another job ASAP. That’s not the case. But obviously there’s still an unlimited number of improvements that can be made in a system that’s clearly failing to provide for many people.