I'm really sorry that you had to go through this, I truly am. :(

The original poster has absolutely no clue how painful this system is to so many people. He had the good fortune of not having to deal with the system in a negative manner yet.

I've told this story before (and I recall your username so maybe we spoke before) but I'll tell it again. My father had a cardiac arrest in March 2021 and unfortunately passed away in the critical care unit of our local hospital. They rushed him in an ambulance to the hospital and tried to stabilize him for about a day so they could transfer him to a significantly better hospital 30 mins away(one of the best in NJ) for surgery. They never could successfully stabilize him and he passed away in the critical care unit. I watched him pass away at the age of 64. Just days before he was super happy because he finished his last Sharepoint developer contract and essentially the last job of his career before retirement. His birthday is April 8, he was about to retire.

He passed away March 2. About a month before this, he decided to opt out of his wife's insurance just to save the multi-thousand dollar bill. He was about to enroll in Medicare just as soon as he turned 65 so his thinking was that he felt pretty good, was eating super healthy and while he had occasional pain in his chest that he was working on(taking blood thinners), it shouldn't have been that bad. As you can imagine this was a unbelievably dangerous situation. He paid for insurance essentially his whole life and now his surviving family risked having a bill in the many MANY dozens of thousands of dollars. To make matters worse us while still panicking about him being in the critical care unit tried to re-activate his insurance on March 1 but it was too late. You have to do it by Feb 28 or else you are dropped. We ended up super unlucky. Fortunately, his wife(my mother) had recently had to take a leave of absense from her job due to her own medical issues. This allowed us to utilize COBRA and thank goodness COBRA allowed us to backpay insurance for both him and her for the prior month. We got so freakin lucky in that regard just thanks to a small provision when COBRA was enacted.

This whole saga makes me incredibly sad and angry at the same time that we have such a garbage system in this piece of shit country. There should never be a situation where you have to be stuck with insurance costs that takes up the majority of your income. Yet this trash system is doing exactly that. My dad was an immigrant from Pakistan and always hustled hard to make ends meet for his family. He successfully raised three kids and put them through college debt free (all successful software engineers). He never incurred much debt but struggled from time to time just due to difficulty finding jobs during the busts of our industry. Nevertheless the fact that he started off as an EE, then an embedded systems firmware developer, then a C Developer, then a Java Developer, then a C# Developer and finally finishing as a Sharepoint developer (with odd jobs in between) showed that he was talented enough to traverse the whole stack(which few developers manage to do and I wish I gave him more credit for) and that he achieved the American dream. He was robbed when it came time to collect on his life's hard work. ONE MONTH. Thats all it was. I can only imagine how so many others were not as lucky as we were that we were still in the COBRA period and had the funds to backpay 2 months of health insurance for two elderly people. I just spent the last year fuming while watching how Biden's trash bill went from including lowering the Medicare age to essentially watering it down until it had practically nothing left to being killed. What is it going to take until people wake up and upend this system?