COBRA is for employees of companies who have 20 or more employees for more than 50% of the working days in the year who have current group health plans.
By FEDERAL LAW all of those employers are REQUIRED to inform an ex-employee of their rights under COBRA. Failure to do so carries fines.
No agent or employer meeting those requirements “hides” these benefits from employees.
I’m a broker and get asked this question quite often by people. All employees who leave a job, unless fired for cause such as theft, have the right to continue coverage.
Most employees don’t do so as they find out that they must pay the full premium that the employer has been mostly paying for them.
There has been in the past additonal help from the Federal Gov in having the employer pay for the coverage for an addtional 9 months for which the employer is supposed to get a tax credit.
One of the most important questions that insurance agents are required to ask the client and is on ALL of the insurance applications is if the application is on COBRA or if they were eligible and turned it down or declined coverage.
So to say the employers or insurance agents “hide” this is incorrect.
You might want to review my comment, which was about HIPAA coverage, not COBRA. I’ve sat in seminars with dozens of people who received no notification whatsoever about their rights under HIPAA, and about the necessity to elect COBRA coverage in order to protect those rights.
In addition, one of the labor organizations I belonged to has compiled a series of complaints from people who’d been convinced to obtain individual coverage, which was then rhetroactively cancelled shortly after the HIPAA “shall issue” window closed. It was a common enough story that it’d take a major suspension of belief to conclude it wasn’t intentional.
In my own HIPAA experience with a major insurer, I filed an application for individual coverage, checking the box that requested a policy under the HIPAA provisions in the event I failed to qualify. When I didn’t meet their underwriting standards, they coveniently “overlooked” my shall issue request. Fortunately, I noticed within the window, and submitted a new request.
I don’t doubt your assertions about COBRA, but that wasn’t what I was referring to.