2009 Stimulus Bill Changes Cobra Plan for Unemployed Workers
April 1, 2010 by John38
As you know employers are required to provide health insurance coverage for 18 months after an employee leaves his job under the Cobra act. What has changed with the Cobra law under the new 2009 stimulus plan from the Obama administration may surprise many people.
The provisions embedded in the over $800 billion dollar stimulus plan that passed, would load employers down with new provisions for Cobra administrators. This will be the biggest change ever since Congress enacted the law in 1986 to help Americans maintain health care coverage. The additional Cobra provision under H.R. 598 has two major measures that have a massive cost for today and tomorrow.
First, if an individual stops working as early as age 55, they could retain Cobra coverage until they reach Medicare eligibility. It also doesn’t matter how long they have worked for the employer either. They would still be eligible under this new twist to the economic stimulus plan pushed through by mostly Democrats.
The law currently allows for health insurance coverage for only 18 months after the employee leaves. Under current Cobra law, the employee must pay 102% of the health insurance premium or the coverage is lost.
Second, the Cobra bill provides for a federal “COBRA Premium Subsidy” for employees that were laid off from Sept. 1, 2008, through Dec. 31, 2009. The subsidy will cover 65% of the health insurance premium payment for up to 9 months through a Cobra plan provider. The provider will receive compensation in the form of a tax credit to cover the shortfall in the insurance premium payment.
There has been little opposition to the plan given the economic slump that started in 2008 and seems to be headed deep into 2009. Most employers agree that to provide assistance with health insurance premiums on a temporary basis is an excellent idea.
Under the new health reform law, people of modest means will get help paying for health insurance premiums and “cost-sharing” expenses – costs that people with insurance have to pay out-of-pocket like co-payments for doctor visits and hospital care – beginning in 2014. This help will come in the form of credits that will be available in the new health insurance exchanges. By providing low- and moderate-income families with affordable health insurance …
As the Obama administration has joined U.S.
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I'll grant you, the choices are less than stellar this time around, but anybody that thinks “The Messiah” or “The Glacier” is their candidate had better ask themselves two very simple but important questions:
1. Do I really want MORE money taken out of my paycheck?
2. Do I really want to pay for my neighbors health insurance premiums?
Both are an absolute done deal with the Dems, but at least with McVain we have 50/50 shot at keeping SOME of our dough.
It's real simple…..can it get any worse for you? Have your own economy…stay out of the system whenever possible. Garden… read medical and herbal treatment books to prevent illness. Rely on the government for national defense. That was the original plan and little else. Use cash, not checks, whenever possible. Find alternative ways to save. I would rather see the 10th amendment and states rights take over and the Feds fail…you will be much better off. Think of your world with no Pelosi or Frank in your life in anyway. For the record. insurance is a ponzi scheme, too…
I'm in the same boat per say with my daughter. I'm in Indiana and we have a state law that states the same thing about covering the child until they are 24 with or without being a student. However, the insurance I have through work is they won't cover her after she turns 19. I contacted the insurance to find out why they are not following the law and they stated that my company is a "self-insured" company and means they don't have to follow state laws just federal laws.
If the work insurance is self-insured, then they make their own rules. They can tell you who and for how long a person is covered.
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ALL COUNTY ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS. ALL COUNTY MEDI-CAL PROGRAM … ALL COUNTY HEALTH EXECUTIVES. ALL COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH DIRECTORS. SUBJECT: HEALTH INSURANCE …
Filename : c09-02.pdf
Fullpath : /services/medi-cal/eligibility/Documents/c09-02.pdf
Publisher : dhcs.ca.gov
Found at Thursday, 11 Nov 2010 GMT
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I share some background below to give context for how deeply upset–feeling a sense of betrayal of basic honesty and decency –that I and other individuals and organizations working for fundamental healthcare reform are feeling about the exploitation of religious groups and faith-inspired individuals by individuals at the group “Helaht Care For All” to work on something that has been revealed to be, in large measure, a sham. It sickens me. It is enough to make a person severely heartsick as well as morally outraged.
So many people suffer and die unnecessarily for lack of health insurance coverage in Massachusetts, as they do in all states, and the “ACT!” campaign led by the group “Helath Care for All” was from the start intended not to fundamentally address and solve that crisis but to be a simple tactic to pressure legislators. As many have explained to me and I have confirmed independently, “ACT!” was never intended to achieve universal or “near universal” healthcare, only to get modest incremental reforms and to leave intact our obscenely unfair, wasteful, and dysfunctional healthcare system.
I have great respect for the indiviidual GBIO members who gave their time and effort to collect signatures for the “ACT!” ballot initiative. I know how hard that work is, having collected hundreds and hundreds of signatures myself for various progressive citizen initiatives over the years. I do not have respect for what has been knwon by many activists for many months, that the signatures collected by GBIO members and others were NOT , and likely were never intended to lead to a statewide ballot question to expand fairly funded healthcare coverage.
The “historic compromise” legislation called Chapter 58 falls grossly short of meaningfully addressing fair funding needs nor does it achieve sustainable expaned healthcare insruance access. So for “Health Care For All” to re-print this article from Forward about what GBIO did to help advance healthreform is grossly misleading. It calls for the truth to be revealed.
I've been a nurse for 13 years working with the underserved at places like Health Care For the Homeless, with the VNA providing homecare in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, and teaching nursing students in med-surg in various hospital settings to community health with the Healthcare for the Homeless and homecare with the poor.
Most recently (fall of 2003) I helped collect them to create the universal Health Care Constitutional Amendment Campaign. Prior to that I collected (in 1999) over 2,000 signatures, working as a team with my husband and our elderly babysitter, to help put Ballot Question 5 for universal Health Care on the Nov 2000 ballot.
In 2005 it was very inspiring how many GBIO members took up the call for providing health care for all and toiled to collect signatures, a task that might sound easy until you really set out to do it in any great number and do it correctly within the law. I knew that passion and sense of justice was there to work on this humanitarian and social justice issue of healht care access.
I had called and met with Lew Finfer from GBIO in 1999, pleading for their organization to help us with our Universal Healthcare ballot initiative that sought to establish a state universal coverage healthcare program and to limit administrative spending in healthcare to 10% (in order to spend our state healthcare dollars more responsibly and to lay the groundwork for affordable, sustainable universal coverage program). I left a packet of materials including the petition sheet, overview fact sheet, and the list of groups who had signed on.
Lew told me that day in 1999 that GBIO was focusing on housing issues so it was unlikely they would participate in the Universal Helathcare ballot initiative that came to be known as Question 5. We toiled on and collected over 100,000 signatures in the Fall and 30,000 in the Spring of 2000 to place our universal healthcare question on the statewide ballot to become a binding law.
“Health Care For All” cut a backroom deal led by Tom Finneran (House Speaker at the time) and HMO lobbysts to abandon Question 5 in exchange for a peice of incremental legislation. These same HMO's that had been trying in other ways to crush our citizen initiative for affordable universal healthcare with legal limits on Admin. spending.
These same Mass. “Non Profit” HMO's gave over $5 MILLION DOLLARS (health insurance premium payment dollars paid by individuals and employers in teh state) to massively fund the deceitful NO on Question 5 campaign led by Richard Lord at AIM–Associated Industries of Massachusetts). We volunteer citizen-activists, adandoned by “Health Care For All” had collected from our own pockets, $100,000 to run the YES campaign.
Ballot Question 5 to create an affordable universal healthcare program lost 48% to 52% on the statewide ballot in 2000.
The health reform heaalthcare justice activists who had given so much of ourselves to Question 5 were feeling crushed. But we picked oursleves up and carried on, creating the citizein initiative Health Care Constitutional Amendment campaign to establish a constitutional right to affordable, comprehensive and equitably financed healht insurance for all state residents.
We went across the state as much as we could in 2002 and 2003 and we invited, asked, we pleaded with other individuals and groups whose stated goals include working on expanding healhtcare access to become a part of this historic effort to make healhtcare our right.
The group “Health Care for All” never became a real part of this effort or helped the campaign. The group did endorse it by name and give testimony at the April 2004 legislative hearing after many many months of our requests. The group did not assist in any way with signature collection nor did they help spread teh word to others that this important effort was underway and needed the help of other health justice activists.
And now, it has become public knowledge that “Health Care For All” has been working against passage of the Health Care Amendment to make healthcare a permanent right for all. Please contact me if you want to understand and learn more about this, or if you can help this sincere and justice-founded effort to enact theMassachusetts citizen initiative amendment to achieve health care for all. Thank you for your time.
Ann Eldridge Malone, RN
Alliance to Defend Health Care
1534 Tremont St, Mission Hill, MA 02120
617-541-3300 Cell 617-784-6367
http://www.DefendHealth.org
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