If You Lose Your Health Insurance, You Can Get COBRA



Posted: Friday, January 08, 2010

by Julie Newman

About a year and a half ago I was making decent money as a car salesman. Things were looking good for my wife and me. We just found out we were expecting our second child, and we just bought our first house.

Apparently, the company I worked for had been in trouble for a while but no one except the boss knew it. Revenue had been dropping for several months, but the staff was unaware of the problem. The first sign of trouble came when the boss started making some spending cuts around the office: no more free coffee; no company cars for the salesmen; different type of light bulbs around the building; different supplies in the restrooms. The boss finally told us about the problems and told us that even with the spending cuts the bottom line was still in trouble. He said instead of laying off employees, he would cut back on work hours for office and sales staff and his managers would have a choice of a pay cut, reduced hours or leaving the company. One manager chose to leave, and he wasn't replaced.

About four months after the pay cuts started our boss told us the company was still in trouble. He said he still didn't want to lay off anyone so he had to eliminate our health insurance. My wife was five months pregnant; this was not good news. If we didn't have health insurance, the bills for the prenatal care and the delivery would be very expensive. I had two choices: find another job where they offered an HMO insurance, which would cover pre-existing conditions, or pay the premium payments for COBRA insurance. Whatever the choice, my wife couldn't be without health insurance.

I couldn't find another job, so for a little more than $450 a month I bought the COBRA insurance to cover the whole family. We considered only covering the pregnancy, but we worried what would happen if one of us got injured or sick and ended up in the hospital. That COBRA payment was a real strain on us financially, but we restructured our budget, cut out some unnecessary spending and used credit cards, and we made it OK.

We were fortunate that we bought the insurance for the whole family. We had two incidents were one of us ended up in the hospital. My little boy got sick and had to spend a couple of nights in the hospital, and I got hurt on a do-it-yourself project at home. The costs for those two bills were thousands of dollars more than what the COBRA payments cost us for four months. All we ended up paying was the co-payment each time we went to the hospital.

I'm still working for the car dealership, and my company still doesn't offer health insurance. Fortunately, we are covered under the insurance for my wife's job. With two small kids we would like for her to stay home and take care of the house and family and maybe baby-sit a couple of other children, but we need to have her health insurance.

If you are curious about prices you only need to get a couple health insurance quotes to find out the information. Decent medical insurance is important for many reasons and you don't want to be without it.

This Article has been viewed 115 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.