If there are no more company operations and no current employees, there is also no plan and no COBRA.
This could also be an issue if a company restructured so it didn't have to offer employees health care because of size or everyone being part time or whatever: COBRA doesn't guarantee that there is a plan from your former employer, it just gives you a right to pay for it yourself if there is, for a certain period of time.
So 46 days of gap between job 1 and job 2? Don't get cobra, just tough it out. If medical bills are >= 3k, then go ahead and sign up for cobra and get a chunk covered.
If your employer was paying $3,000/mo for your insurance, it's going to be $3,060 for you.
Fuck whichever lobbyists made sure that was allowable.
Edit: corrected per the reply.
It's not mandatory and its capped at 2%, not 5%, but, yes, there is a potential additional charge beyond just the full cost (what would be the employer + employee share, for a current employee) of coverage.
Medicaid and CHIP: 85,614,581 people enrolled [1]
Military: 9.5 million people covered [2]
The US has not one but two of the largest single payer health insurance programs in the world.
Medicare alone has more people enrolled than any European country's single payer programs other than Germany (pop 83,294,633) and the UK (pop 67,736,802).
[0] https://medicareadvocacy.org/medicare-enrollment-numbers/ [1] https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica... [2] https://www.health.mil/Military-Health-Topics/MHS-Toolkits/M...
Neither Medicare as a whole nor Medicaid is single-payer. (Individual state Medicaid plans may be single payer plans, but very often they aren't, either.)
Traditional Medicare is single-payer, but the majority (as of this year) of Medicare beneficiaries use partially-subsidized private insurance (Medicare Advantage) plans, not traditional Medicare.
As they said, it is bizarre the lengths the US will go to to maintain its layered system. It seems purpose built to screw people over.
Re: medicare, I think a reasonable way towards universal single payer (or whatever you call medicare advantage plans, as a sibling notes) would be to drop the eligibility age over many years, and eventually get full coverage; and at the same time, add all kids to medicaid. Ex: years 1-10, reduce medicare eligibity age by 1, have medicaid cover kids less than year number; after ten years, medicare covers you at 55, medicaid covers kids less than 10. Years 11-20, reduce medicare eligibity age by 2, still increase kids by one year per year; after twenty years, medicare covers you at 35, and medicaid covers until 18. Years 21-28?, add medicare one year from both ends, and I think at year 28, everyone is covered. Congress should adjust the rollout schedule regularly, as scaling problems emerge, or don't; if after a couple years it becomes obvious that it's too slow or too fast, it can be adjusted; it'd also work, but be more complicated, to do it on a % basis --- once a year, determine what age (years + months even?) would result in a 1% enrollment increase, and do that, you'll finish before 100 years, but I'm not doing the math to figure out how much sooner.
When a business close, if there is no money to pay the insurance company, the plan will be terminated by the insurance company, and correct, there will be no COBRA. Bad situation.
