COBRA sure helps focus one on the true cost of offering health coverage by employers. It's damned expensive.
By the way, Tom Price's reform proposal, the Empowering Patients First Act, would place a $8,000 cap on an employer's ability to deduct the cost of heath insurance provided to single employees, and $20,000 to employees with families. The idea is to discourage gold-plated health coverage.
People need more choices about how much of their health care costs they want to finance by means of insurance. How many folks here would prefer the choice of a reasonable policy that pays for annual checkups and vaccines, and nothing else until your annual health care spend exceeds, say, $5,000?
I had a 5K deductible per event, 80/20 after that to ten grand, and they took over from there. No vision, no dental, but have an account I pay for all that from in pre-tax dollars, up to 7550 a year. So, that went to the small stuff, and held enough for deductible, co-pay, etc. It all worked fine for me, until my provider simply quit. No more health insurance.
Mrs. Joe and I had done the math on what we used annually in actual medical care, even with whatever the insurance had paid, and the actual costs were a fraction of the cost of insurance. At that point, it made more sense to cover the big stuff and pay the little bills out of pocket, and economically, we came out well ahead for years. Now, we'll get fined for breathing.
