I took a gamble and won, which is odd for me. I’m usually so unlucky I haven’t come out ahead on so much as a lottery ticket in close to a decade.

We decided in November to skip buying health insurance through COBRA. That stands for Consolidated Omnibus Reconciliation Act, and it’s the legislation that lets workers continue coverage for a year and a half after leaving their jobs. They have to pick up the full tab, though.

I had a better deal. My former employer would continue to pay the company’s share for three months, cutting my tab roughly in half, to $600 a month.

I knew Big Guy’s asthma medications would come to roughly $200 a month. What were the chances that we’d spend an additional $400? Not very high, unless someone had an accident, a serious illness or an asthma or allergy attack that sent him to the hospital. That “unless” moved the chances to “medium.”

I rolled the dice anyway, because saving $800 in a job market that’s shaky at best in my profession was attractive. It worked. We became insured again Monday when Dad started his new job.

It worked, though, largely because of luck. I wouldn’t have felt nearly as comfortable — or, maybe I should say, I would have felt more uncomfortable relying on luck had I not known we would be out of the weeds in two months.

According to the Boston Globe, there’s a plan to prevent more Americans from having to rely on luck. The ranking Democrat on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee says help with COBRA payments for two years will be included in the economic stimulus package.

COBRA payments average $1,000 a month for an American family — that’s 84 percent of the average unemployment benefit, according to a report the nonprofit organization Families USA is releasing today. Clearly, the math doesn’t work out on that.

There is, of course, the predictable opposition.

“Those aren’t stimulus,” Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, told the Wall Street Journal. “Those are ideological accomplishments in the guise of economic stimulus.”

He’s right that it’s not stimulus. It’s bailout for a group that hasn’t seem much help as the result of federal largess thus far: the average worker.

Let’s ignore for a minute that it’s the humanitarian thing to do in a country shedding more than a half million jobs a month and where experts think the unemployment rate could top 10 percent. Let’s forget that giving people a way to pay for preventative care and maintenance medication will save costs down the road.

If we start talking like that, people will label this as just another handout from illogical bleeding-heart liberals who think with their emotions instead of their wallets.

Let’s look at other financial impacts of not doing this.

Hospitals from Pennsylvania to California already are struggling under the weight of caring for the uninsured. Some already have filed for bankruptcy.

A report this week by PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts hospitals nationwide will see bad debt rise this year and also rely more on payments from government-funded programs and less on private insurance. And this at a time when states are cutting programs as they struggle budgets.

Maybe viewing it in those terms will help people like Ryan see it from the perspective of their business constituency instead of looking it from the viewpoint of people who would never vote for them anyway.

Because we wouldn’t want to do anything to help folks this “downturn” has stomped the hardest: People who increasingly choose luck as health insurance in the face of an alternative that’s unaffordable.

Copyright 2009 Debra Legg. All rights reserved.

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