Question about cancelling COBRA benefits and the "loss of coverage" event that will allow me to sign up for new benefits with my new employer.

tl;dr – I want to extend my COBRA benefits past December 1st, which is when I have to sign up for my new employer’s benefits by to be covered with them. But I don’t want the COBRA benefits much longer than another month or 2. Would cancelling COBRA in a month or 2 count as a life/qualifying event that would allow me to sign up for my company’s new benefits after December?

So here’s the full scenario: I just got a new job at the beginning of November. I have until the end of the month to sign up for their health plan to be covered under their plan moving forward. If I don’t sign up by the end of the month, the next time I can sign up would be the next open enrollment near the end of 2023 (meaning I could be without health insurance from December 2022 to whenever their open enrollment is, we’ll say November 2023). Obviously, I don’t want that.

I signed up for COBRA to extend my old employer’s plan since my new plan wouldn’t have been effective for me until December even if I sign up this month. So COBRA was intended to just get me to December and make sure I had coverage in November.

So here’s the tricky things I’m trying to clarify:

I’m going to leave some of the details vague, but the gist…we are having a procedure done in December that is not covered under the NEW benefits from my new employer, but is covered under our current/COBRA-extended benefits.

This procedure costs enough that paying for COBRA for another month or 2 is definitely worth it since it will cover the procedure and any additional costs around that (which out of pocket would be probably 4-5 times the cost of me paying the more expensive monthly cost of COBRA).

So my question is this: If I hold on to COBRA until December 15th (as an example), and then call them to cancel that day…does that count as the “loss of coverage” qualifying event that will allow me to sign up for benefits with my new company once January starts? Or does the loss of coverage event only get triggered by the COBRA benefits running to the end “naturally” (18 months? I forget how long I can be covered on it).

I had somebody on the phone with Cigna tell me that it should count as a qualifying event to be eligible to sign up for new benefits at that point, but we had some slight communication issues and I want to be 100% sure by verifying with others as well (so I don’t end up being screwed by 1 rep who might have had wrong information).

Thanks for any info you can give me!