Multiple COBRA Renewal Cycles to Bridge Medicare?

[vessmech]

Long time lurker....appreciate all the information I learn from this forum!

So DW and I are 54 and 60 respectively. We have looked at the issue of bridging to Medicare coverage. For myself, I am OK with the ACA but DW wants to keep private insurance for her doctors (serious medical issues).

DW works in the medical field and can easily be rehired at any point in the future.

Our plan is to use her medical plan to COBRA for 18 months and near the end of that term for her to rehire to the same company for a short period of time (months?) to be eligible for their private insurance. Once again COBRA for 18 months....rinse and repeat to get her to Medicare age.

Does anyone see any issues with this approach? Seems like a simple way to bridge the medical coverage gap if the ACA is not an option.

Thanks!

 

[MichaelB]

Belated welcome. Glad you finally got around to that first post ..

Our plan is to use her medical plan to COBRA for 18 months and near the end of that term for her to rehire to the same company for a short period of time (months?) to be eligible for their private insurance. Once again COBRA for 18 months....rinse and repeat to get her to Medicare age.

Does anyone see any issues with this approach? Seems like a simple way to bridge the medical coverage gap if the ACA is not an option.

This sounds feasible. AFAIK COBRA has no 'minimum employment term", so as soon as she's met her employer eligibility for healthcare coverage, she's once again eligible for new COBRA coverage.

Your DW also has the ACA as her fallback Plan B. If anything goes wrong with the job / COBRA approach she can sign up for a marketplace plan. There are eligibility requirements when signing up for ACA outside of open enrollment, so if she does lose her coverage during the year just make sure she signs up within the deadlines.

 

[vessmech]

Thanks Michael - I could not think of any obvious reason why this would not work.

I also could not find any COBRA rules limiting how often you can start COBRA coverage after a qualifying event or any aggregate max length of coverage for multiple uses of COBRA. It all seems to come down to once you have employer health insurance then you are eligible for the full length of COBRA....over and over again.

Thanks again.

 

[euro]

Of course, the employer might get tired of the process at some point. Hiring, onboarding, offboarding each time all cost time and money and if they only get a few weeks or months of work out of her once every 18 months then they may lose interest.

 

[vessmech]

Euro - true, but her work situation lends itself to this arrangement.

The setup is ~80 outpatient locations in the state with most having high turnover rates - especially in less 'desirable' locations. These are run pretty much independently. Since we are looking at short employment times, we can travel to any job openings in the state.

 

[Bir48die]

Dang. Why didn't I think of that?