@bjdickmayhew has your new health insurance kicked in yet?
— Colleen (@Col1482) February 2, 2017
I was joking with my sister on Twitter about previous strings of mostly teenage bad judgment and she became eminently practical. Yes, I do have my insurance again. But this illustrates the end of a common use of a one way option that destabilizes the employer sponsored insurance (ESI) risk pool.
My last day at my previous employer was December 23rd. My ESI sponsored insurance ran through December 31st. I started at Duke on January 3rd. Duke has a very reasonable policy that insurance benefits start the first of the month after you get hired. So I started my benefits on Wednesday at Duke with their cheap narrow network plan as I am healthy and I am self selecting to the low cost option.
But the time between the end of my previous ESI and the start of my new ESI has some interesting policy implications. What are my choices as someone who is fundamentally healthy and an operating profit center for an insurer? The odds are that in any given month I use no services even if I am not trying to be careful.
1) Pay 102% of the full ESI premium to buy into COBRA for a month to cover me and my family
2) Get on my wife’s ESI sponsored plan at an incremental cost of $300
3) Buy a QHP for myself on Exchange
4) Buy a mini-med/short term policy for a month
5) Go uncovered
5-b)Go uncovered while planning on the Cobra option if I get hit by a meteor
I chose 5-b. But let’s go through the options first to see what the policy implications are: