COBRA is really spendy. AFAICR, it's allowing you to continue payments on your policy, but you then have to pick up what the employer was paying. In best of cas

COBRA is really spendy. AFAICR, it's allowing you to continue payments on your policy, but you then have to pick up what the employer was paying. In best of cases this usually means a doubling of what you used to realize as a health insurance cost. COBRA's value is that it insulates you from a gap in coverage and/or a forced change to your provider network and benefit structure. For younger people without unmanaged chronic conditions, I think COBRA provides little value at all, but YMMV based on risk-tolerance. > it's up to you to protect your ass and to manage your contracts/engagements/agreements to profit. You can use a union as your employment agent, but they'll take a cut for their trouble and introduce some other dynamics to your employment (wage caps, seniority considerations, another political realm to manage).