Unequal COBRA situation

cebudragonlady · April 2002

Situation: owner of our plant fired an employee on February 28th. Owner says that employee must pay all of health insurance premiums starting March 1 under COBRA - the day after termination.

My problem with this is : suppose employee was terminated March 1st. Then because of the way our insurance is billed, the company would carry 1/2 of employee's premiums until March 31st - 30 days after termination. In this
scenario, the employee doesn't have to start COBRA until April 1st. After April 1st, the employee would then pay all premiums.

Are we supposed to treat all employees equally ? The fired employee in this case wnated the company to pay the 1/2 of his premiums for March. The owner said no.

Comments ?

t

AnaFL · April 2002

I guess it all depends on exactly how your policy goes. It seems to me that because the employee was terminated on the last day of a month, they would in fact start cobra on the first day of the following month. If they had worked on March 1st and only at the end of the day got termed, then you would start cobra on the first of the following month, i.e. April 1st.

Our policy goes that way too and we do apply that consistently, regardless of what the employee requests, they all get treated the same way. The only exception we had was when we had layoffs last year. Part of our layoff procedure/package included allowing employees to only pay their portion of insurance costs for six months, while the company carried the rest, and if they weren't recalled after the six months, then cobra started on the first day of the seventh month. Cobra did actually officially begin on the first day of the following month in which they were laid off, but they didn't have to pay the full cobra rate until after six months, or if they resigned in the midst of their lay off time.

SandiF · July 2002

Our policy works the same and yes we follow it. For ours it's the same situation when someone begins employment. If they start on the 1st, they have benefits starting on the 1st, if they start on the 2nd, their benefits don't begin until the first of the next month.