As for persons buying insurance on their own, "HIPAA also added some portability protections into the individual market but they're not nearly as extensive," Pollitz says.  The rule is that if you had 18 months of continuous coverage, and exhausted your eligibility for COBRA — which allows individuals to stay on their previous employers' plan if they pay the full premium, and the last day of that continuous coverage was on a group plan, an individual policy can't turn you down and can't exclude preexisting conditions.  But you can be charged more than healthy individuals for that policy in most states; some states have instituted their own non-discrimination policies, saying everyone has to be charged the same amount.