I'm jumping the gun here but I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with getting short term health insurance to bridge the gap between jobs? I'm anticipating a job offer soon and since I take medications regularly I'll want something to defray the costs and ensure that I don't have a lapse of more than 63 days of insurance coverage.
I looked at www.ehealthinsurance.com and scoped out a few plans. But all of them seem to have pre-existing condition clauses. I found this on another web site about Oregon specific health insurance: All health plans in Oregon must limit exclusion of pre-existing conditions. There are rules about what counts as a pre-existing condition and how long you must wait before a new health plan will begin to pay for care for that condition. Generally, if you join a new plan, your old coverage will be credited toward the pre-existing condition exclusion period, provided you did not have a long break in coverage.
I suppose the best thing to do would be to call. The plans I was looking at considered anything diagnosed in the past 5 years to be pre-existing but I've had health insurance/coverage for the past 9 so does that mean it doesn't count as pre-existing? Yeah, lots of questions.
I did find out that I can get COBRA to the tune of $420/mo. It's spendy but if it would be less hassle I'm almost tempted to do it. However the short-term Regency policy I was looking at was only $220 for 3 months if I paid all at once. Of course then there's a $250 deductible and then after that I pay 20% of all costs.
Ugh. I hate trying to figure this stuff out.
Edited to add: Well its not an option for me. I just called their info line and was told that if a short term insurance plan were to accept me, then yes I would be covered and the pre-existing condition thing wouldn't be an issue. However, because of my pre-existing condition they will not accept me. So that means COBRA for at least one month.
Short term insurance options?
September 14th, 2007 at 12:35 am
September 14th, 2007 at 01:04 pm 1189775056
September 14th, 2007 at 06:37 pm 1189795021