<\/p>\n
\n Venus Williams returns a shot against Magdalena Frech<\/a> on day 4 of the Mubadala Citi DC Open. Williams, 45, said she’s been on COBRA health insurance.<\/p>\n Scott Taetsch\/Getty Images<\/p>\n hide caption\n <\/p>\n toggle caption<\/p>\n Scott Taetsch\/Getty Images<\/p>\n What drove Venus Williams to the court at the Mubadala Citi DC Open<\/a> this week after a year-long break from competition?<\/p>\n “I had to come back for the insurance,” she quipped in an on-court interview<\/a> after winning her first-round match on Tuesday. “I was like, ‘I got to get my benefits on!’ Started training.”<\/p>\n The crowd at the stadium in D.C. laughed knowingly. “You guys know what it’s like!” she said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Venus Williams made the remarks about health insurance after winning her first round match on Tuesday. <\/p>\n YouTube<\/p>\n Even if you’re not a seven-time grand slam champion who just became the oldest player to win a pro women’s singles match in decades, you probably know the job-health insurance juggle that Williams was talking about.<\/p>\n Here are four ways U.S. health insurance can be challenging for Williams and many other Americans.<\/p>\n 1. Her job is a little off and on. <\/p>\n In the U.S., most working-age people get their health insurance through work<\/a>. Their employer gives them a few plan options and then pays a healthy chunk of the premium cost, with the rest deducted from employees’ paychecks.<\/p>\n When someone leaves a regular job maybe to start a business or take a break, there goes that health insurance deal. That’s essentially what happened to Williams \u2014 she took a break from competition and lost access to her regular benefits.<\/p>\n The health insurance Venus Williams got through the Women’s Tennis Association was a “best-in-class global medical, dental and vision insurance plan,” WTA wrote in a statement to NPR. In order to be eligible, players have to have a certain ranking and play a certain number of events in the previous year, according to the statement, and coverage lasts for the full calendar year.<\/p>\n “They informed me earlier this year I’m on COBRA,” Williams explained on the court Tuesday. COBRA is a law that allows you to keep your job-based insurance plan after your job ends, but you have to pay for the whole premium yourself.<\/p>\n “With COBRA, you may have a very good plan, but your health care costs are going to go up,” explains Miranda Yaver<\/a>, health policy professor at the University of Pittsburgh. It’s notoriously expensive, often $500 per month or more. COBRA to cover a whole family’s insurance premium can easily rival a mortgage payment.<\/p>\n Venus Williams is a multi-millionaire, so the premium cost might not matter to her in the same way it does to the average person, especially if it allows her to keep that “best-in-class” plan she’s used to.<\/p>\n 2. She has health care needs. <\/p>\n “Let me tell you, I’m always at the doctor, so I need this insurance,” Williams said in her courtside interview.<\/p>\n Williams recently explained<\/a> she had surgery<\/a> for uterine fibroids that had gone undertreated for years, she said. She also was diagnosed<\/a> with an auto-immune condition called Sjogren’s syndrome<\/a> in 2011.<\/p>\n She’s also an elite athlete. “Someone in her position might need physical therapy, sports, medicine, specialized care, and to be able to get that anywhere in the world,” says Cynthia Cox<\/a>, a vice president at the health research organization KFF.<\/p>\n Plus, Williams is now 45 years old. Health insurance costs generally increase with age, as do health problems.<\/p>\n All of that could make finding a health plan that works for her more complicated than for most people.<\/p>\n 3. She has way more options than she used to. <\/p>\n Before the Affordable Care Act, Venus Williams would have really been in a tough spot.<\/p>\n Professional athletes were included on a list of “Ineligible Occupations”<\/a> \u2014 jobs that health insurance companies deemed too risky to provide coverage for \u2014 along with loggers, miners and taxi cab drivers.<\/p>\n Also back then, “even a wealthy person might have had preexisting conditions that could have made them uninsurable no matter how much money they were willing to pay for their premium,” Cox says.<\/p>\n That contributed to “job lock” \u2014 where people were stuck in their jobs no matter what because they needed the health insurance.<\/p>\n Now, if Williams really didn’t want to compete anymore and ran out of her 18-months of COBRA coverage, she could go to Healthcare.gov<\/a> and buy an Affordable Care Act plan.<\/p>\n 4. Only in the U.S., jobs and health insurance are deeply linked. <\/p>\n There’s no escaping the fact that in America, health insurance is connected to employment. “The dominant insurance model in the United States is employer-sponsored insurance,” Yaver says. (The story of how that came to be<\/a> is related to the post-World War II economy when health insurance was a “fringe benefit,” to attract employees in a tight labor market.) Yaver adds that for workers who get insurance from their jobs, it’s often “a good deal.”<\/p>\n Since Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the public insurance plan for low-income people, Medicaid, will soon be tied to work, too. Beneficiaries will have to periodically prove they’re working a certain number of hours per month to be able to keep their health benefits. That requirement will affect mostly middle-aged, low-income women, according to a recent analysis<\/a>.<\/p>\n For Venus Williams, the off-and-on nature of her job that comes with a high risk of injuries makes employer-based health insurance especially hard. In a way, the tennis hall-of-famer is dealing with a very special version of “job lock.”<\/p>\n Her fans can celebrate, though. Even if it’s for the health insurance, they get to see her on the court again; she’s playing a tournament next month in Cincinnati.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Venus Williams returns a shot against Magdalena Frech on day 4 of the Mubadala Citi DC Open. 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