When You Lose More Than Your Job
By James Williams
I lost my job at the end of August. Nothing bad happened; we got a new head of the department and he decided to bring in his own people, subsequently firing some of us. Amidst all of the unknowns of losing my job, I got a letter in the mail a few weeks later about a topic I hadn’t thought about: health insurance.
When someone loses a job, they generally lose health insurance, since in America, most health insurance is provided through your employer. In 1985, the US Congress passed the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, otherwise known as COBRA, which allows individuals who among other scenarios lose their jobs, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
The goal of COBRA is to ensure that folks who lose their jobs don’t also lose their health insurance. When I read the COBRA letter, I was thrilled that I was going to end up being able to keep my health insurance. Now, I am a healthy person, but it’s nice to know I have insurance in case of an emergency.
As I read this COBRA letter, I got to the line where it said that if I took advantage of it, I would have to pay the full premium amount out of pocket, which in this case came out to over $230 per month. That is an insane amount of money for anyone, especially someone who doesn’t have an income, or relies on unemployment insurance benefits, which in a lot of states doesn’t cover more then $300 or so per week.
I hadn’t thought much about this because I didn’t need to. Up until now, I have either had work or been eligible to be on my parents’ health insurance plan. However, I have since aged out of eligibility on my parents’ plan. Even prices on the Healthcare marketplace created by the ACA were outside of my price range given my zero income.
When someone loses their job, they have a lot of things to think about and worry about. Health insurance shouldn’t be one of those things they have to worry about. Project 2029’s newly released healthcare policies will help us reduce or eliminate that worry by ensuring that every person is able to obtain reasonable health insurance.
