COBRA

COBRA

I had hoped to get a permanent job with health insurance by the time that HP's benefits expired, but that doesn't seem to be happening. To my surprise and pleasure, it is actually a bit cheaper to pay for COBRA for medical, dental, and vision services for my son and me than it is to add both of us to my wife's Blue Cross plan through her employer. But it is even cheaper to add him to her plan, and use COBRA for my medical and dental.

Vision services insurance is expensive enough, and the amount of services required is sufficiently predictable, that it doesn't make sense to buy it, for the reasons that I articulate here.

Even the dental insurance does not make sense for me to carry. I get a cleaning and exam twice a year, dental X-rays once a year. The cleaning and exam alone is $130; when they do the X-rays as well, it comes to $209. That's less than approximately $500 a year that the dental insurance costs. I have had one filling that required replacement in the last five years, so the odds are that nothing is going come up that justifies the dental insurance in the next year or two--and even replacing a filling would probably barely make the dental insurance pay for itself.