Well, you wonder, where's the outrage for the insurance industry and republicans saying no to ANY health insurance reform? Where are all the newly unemployed who are losing their health insurance? Why aren't they screaming at these town hall meetings at least as loud as people on Medicare?
The answer is: the feds have a TEMPORARY band-aid on the system to make sure that those newly unemployed, the hundreds of thousands of families, don't feel the full cost of our shitty system. A bandaid that gets ripped off in December.
U.S. workers who lose health benefits after a job loss can remain on their employers’ group plan for up to 18 months under the 1986 law known as Cobra. Unemployed workers typically pay the entire cost of the health-care premium, plus a 2 percent administrative fee.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, passed in February, included a $24.7 billion subsidy to reduce health care costs for the growing number of unemployed. Employers are required to pay 65 percent of their former employees’ Cobra premiums and file for a tax credit. The benefit is available for those who involuntarily lost their job under certain circumstances from Sept. 1, 2008, through Dec. 31, 2009. The subsidy phases out for taxpayers with an adjusted gross income above $125,000 for an individual and $250,000 for those filing jointly.
The average cost to remain on an employer’s group plan with Cobra is $1,078 per month based on data from 2008, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, California. The federal subsidy reduces the average cost to $377 per month for a family.
Italics added
http://www.bloomberg.com/...
Now, I'm not suggesting that we (meaning dems, since almost no republicans voted for the ARRA) were wrong to save families from a burden that would have caused them to drop insurance.
But there's no doubt that the system looks better than it is and feels better than it is is due solely to TWENTY FOUR FRICKEN BILLION DOLLARS that is there to AMELIORATE THE EFFECTS OF THE SYSTEM. To save us from our crap system, we spent it with barely a blink and, as far as I know, not a single peep from our free market republican friends.
What kind of system do we have, that it is only barely tolerable to most americans if we have to put twenty four billion bucks into it in less than a year just for the newly unemployed people? Not even counting the people who have been unemployed for longer.
Well, the subsidy only lasts for nine months, which means that people are running out of COBRA subsidy by the end of the year.
http://www.dol.gov/...
Is anyone currently on the subsidy? DO you have a story?
And what now?