End of the PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY

During the Public Health Emergency (PHE), numerous changes assisted employees and businesses affected by the COVID19 pandemic. Test kits & vaccines were essentially free to us all. And specific to COBRA, it provided “extended” time frames for plan participants and qualified beneficiaries, mandating that the normal sixty-day COBRA election period and the forty-five/thirty-day standard premium payment grace periods were “disregarded” until the end of the outbreak period.

On April 10, 2023 POTUS Biden signed House Joint Resolution 7, which immediately ended the PHE on that date. The informal outbreak period end date set by DOL is July 10, 2023. Following the end of the outbreak period, plan administrators and employers will once again need to apply the normal COBRA timing rules to COBRA election, payment, and notice deadlines, including COVID test kits and vaccines now being covered like any other illness test kit, and for COBRA:

The 60-day deadline for qualified beneficiaries to elect COBRA coverage; The 45-day deadline for qualified beneficiaries to make an initial COBRA premium payment (subject to any special plan rule or grace period); The 30-day deadline for qualified beneficiaries to make subsequent COBRA premium payments (subject to any special plan rule or grace period); The 14-day deadline for plan administrators (or 44 days if the plan administrator is the employer) to provide COBRA election notices to qualified beneficiaries.

NOTE: For those of you who use an outside vendor to administer your COBRA, these steps are already taken for you.