It’s too easy to lose health insurance

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:

It’s too easy to lose health insurance

I jeopardized my family’s health insurance because of a missed email, said Dr. Danielle Ofri in The New York Times. I got stuck on an unwanted plan last year because I had missed the open-enrollment period. How is that possible? Easy. A spam filter on my email "had apparently swept up all the emails from HR," and with work and children and my patients, I had lost track of enrollment dates. Worse, the "basic plan" I received by default is only for employees, meaning my spouse and children were left without health insurance. "The stated reason for this bureaucratic merry-go-round is that eligibility must be ascertained every year so as not to allot services to someone who doesn’t qualify." But it makes it frighteningly easy for qualified Americans to lose coverage.

Real estate blues: ‘Stay alive until ’25’

Mortgage companies are so desperate they are firing brokers and asking for bonuses back, said Ben Eisen and Andrew Ackerman in The Wall Street Journal. "The mortgage industry is notoriously boom or bust," but with rates close to 8% and applications dried up, "this bust is especially bad — and it’s only getting started." Guaranteed Rate and its affiliates are telling former employees that they must return their signing bonuses, which in some cases topped $1 million — when "mortgage bankers were raking in cash." One broker was let go "one month shy" of the date on which the employer could no longer recover the bonus. "At the Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual conference recently, a mantra repeated by a few speakers was 'Stay alive until '25,' when things might get a little better."

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A wave of CEO departures

The Great Resignation for CEOs is just ramping up, said Jo Constantz in Bloomberg. "More than 1,400 chief executives" at companies tracked by executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas "have left their positions so far this year through September," up almost 50% from the same period last year. It’s the highest rate of departures on record over that period since the firm began tracking in 2002. One theory: "Exhaustion may now be catching up to executives, even as the overall quit rate among U.S. employees drifts back to its pre-pandemic norm." HR experts also say that companies tend to "prefer the stability of a steady hand on the wheel" during periods of great uncertainty, such as the pandemic and are now making long-delayed changes.

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