House Democrats will unveil a bill to dramatically expand COBRA subsidies for laid-off and furloughed workers.
A new bill from House Democrats, previewed exclusively to Vox, aims to give laid-off or furloughed workers a way to stay on their health insurance plan at no extra cost to them — through increased subsidies with the existing health insurance plan COBRA.
COBRA allows laid-off workers to keep buying into their health insurance plans. But there’s a big catch: It can be prohibitively expensive because laid-off people are on the hook for their part of the insurance premium as well as their employer’s part (on average, $7,200 for an individual and more than $20,000 for a family).
“That can be easily $1,000 a month, and if you just lost your job, you don’t have $1,000 a month,” House Committee on Education and Labor Chairman Bobby Scott (D-VA), a main bill sponsor, told Vox in an interview Monday.
The new bill, called the Worker Health Coverage Protection Act, is Democrats’ proposal to fix a growing problem due to the economic fallout from coronavirus: people losing their employer-sponsored health insurance. An April 2 Economic Policy Institute report estimated as many as 3.5 million people could have lost the health insurance they got through their employer in the previous two weeks. The timing is not ideal. The middle of a deadly global pandemic is a particularly bad time to be uninsured; intensive care for coronavirus treatment can cost tens of thousands of dollars…
0To read the entire article from Vox, click https://www.vox.com/2020/4/14/21219461/democrats-new-plan-keep-laid-off-workers-insured
