The insurance company would explain to them that the million is for you, and it is yearly, but is, ahem, "fixable."  They will say "as long as she is on your insurance (wink, wink) this charge will be there.  So what you have to ask yourself (more wink, wink) is whether this employee is worth a million dollar a year salary on top of what you are already paying her."

Social worker said she had seen small business owners go almost broke trying to cover this charge, and had even heard of one who defiantly did go broke, throwing all of the employees out of work.  But more usually, she said, they just fire you.

"Wait, wait!" say you, "Isn't it illegal to fire someone for their health history?  Suppose I'm all well and working?"

She looks at you with more pity, says yes, so of course they will have to find "cause" to fire you, which any employer can always do.

"But I am a very, very good employee!" you protest.

"Yes," she says, "but they can always find some cause."  The real problem she goes on to explain, is that you will find a new job, that company's insurer will slap them with the surcharge, they will take their turn at firing you, until you've been through six or seven jobs in a year, fired "for cause" from all of them, which of course looks very, very bad to a prospective employer.

"So in a year or so of this, you will not just be uninsurable, you will also be unemployable."

She asks who your husband works for, since they'd probably try to do this to him too.  You say he is a cop working for a municipality, which pleases her.  "They have all sorts of layers of officials, elected and otherwise, to work their way through to get to the decision, then once they do they have to get past his union, so it will take much longer to get him fired."  She also, though, offered sympathy for the fact that what with the police union and the municipality fighting out whatever "cause" they got him on in such a public profession, it was sure to end up in the local papers and disrupt all our lives - including the children's - when they did get that far.

You remind her you seem headed for divorce, and she says, well, okay then, just carry the COBRA to the limit and keep on working for small not-for-profits that don't offer insurance.