Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act - COBRA
Categories: Insurance, Regulations
You've worked at the same company for five years. They've paid you a nice salary, you get ten vacation days a year, and—most importantly—you have health insurance for you and your family. Then you find out that the CEO's mistress has cleared out all of the company’s bank accounts and exposed a wealth of crimes committed by the executives.
Your company evaporates overnight. “What are you going to do about your health insurance?” will be the very first question your mother asks you when you relay the news.
Luckily, the U.S. government passed a law called the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (or COBRA) back in 1985. This law created a mechanism for continuous health insurance coverage for workers should they meet certain qualifying conditions. These qualifying events, which require individuals to pay the full premiums they have for upwards of 102% of the cost, include both voluntary and involuntary job losses, a decline in work hours, death of the policyholder, and divorce of the policyholder.
Individuals may qualify for up to 18 months of coverage, although extensions are possible.
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Finance: What is an Omnibus Account?111 Views
Finance a la shmoop. What is an omnibus account?
Herbi just eats leaves, Carni just eats meat, Omni well it's pretty much [Different buses eating stuff]
everything. So yeah an omnibus as in bus-i-ness or business account services is
a bunch of investors who've all pitched in or wired in their capital to become a
percentage owner of that omnibus account. Why would people do this? Scale, volume,
discounts size, heft. When you have a lot of money in an account basic things like [Lots of money in a suitcase]
audit and legal fees and brokerage services and the fees with them and
other one-off costs get amortized across a lot of people in dollars invested [Definition of Amortization]
rather than being laid entirely or solely on one investor where they can
then be a meaningful percentage of the total and with an omnibus account you [Bus labelled Omni eating leaves]
also get anonymity since it's a broker dealing in street name with the account [Anonymity stamp]
interfacing with the street well investors can live if they want in the
lovely dark shadows of Erewhon. Omnibus accounts are sort of like your own [Full moon in a dark sky]
custom mutual fund without the whole nav, net asset value stamp requirements at
the end of each trading day and all the other regulations and filings and legal
crap needed for publicly offered securities it's like having a fully [Book labelled my very own omnibus account]
gassed up bus with a working GPS and Waze system you can drive anywhere you [Guy sat on a bus]
want on the investing landscape you don't have to tell anyone outside of
your own partners about it, and it works great as long as you all want to eat the
same kind of financial cooking.. [Omni asking Carni if he is going to finish his food]