COBRA hates you (Part II)
- January 19, 2010
- 0 comments
- Posted in Health Insurance, Latest Posts
Another Cobra scandal, reported by the Los Angeles Times’ David Lazarus. Stacy Owens, 25, had her Aetna COBRA policy canceled. The company never told her about it. She discovered the cancellation in November, when a bill from one of her doctors wasn’t paid.
Turns out, the premium had gone up in August–but she wasn’t told about that either. Aetna didn’t send her a notification until two months after the increase took effect. In the meantime, she was faithfully paying the old premiums on time, and Aetna was cashing the checks. Then she was canceled for non-payment of the increase ($64) that she was never told about.
Stacy is a thyroid cancer survivor and requires a lot of medication. Makes one wonder: Maybe her high claims had something to do with Aetna’s “error.”
Aetna refused to take Stacy back–even though she proved the error was theirs–until David Lazarus got involved. Then the company said, for public consumption, “oo0, sorry, we didn’t handle this well.” But there can’t be a inquiring reporter for every victim of wrongful policy cancellation. There’s a lot more abuse going on with COBRA than we know.
Tags: COBRA
