Finding Momentum

So I finally got approved for insur­ance. A brief overview of how I did it:

• Researched a ton of plans. Used resources like about.com and Wikipedia and a lot of other Googling to fig­ure out what “short term” cov­er­age exactly meant.
• I dis­cov­ered that short term plans have really high deductibles (at least $500). Given the short dura­tion of my non­cov­er­age, I deter­mined that my health costs were going to be sig­nif­i­cantly less than the deductible, so I’d have to cough up the money for my doctor’s vis­its, pre­scrip­tions, shots, etc any­ways. Thus, it was more impor­tant to me to find the cheap­est monthly plan with a decent cov­er­age for big accidents.
• Then I dis­cov­ered that there were daily insur­ance plans (i.e. if you know the exact date x days from now that you’ll get insur­ance again, there exist plans that cover you for those x days). They turn out to be cheaper, too, because the insur­ance com­pany knows exactly how long you need cov­er­age for and that adjusts their risk calculations.
• I called up my doc­tor and dis­cov­ered that they weren’t in the Blue Cross net­work, so that ruled out a Blue Cross plan (it’s too much trou­ble to switch doc­tors right now!).
• Most of my plan research was done on ehealthinsurance.com. Why did I choose them? They had the first result on Google and their site looked rea­son­ably trust­wor­thy and was easy to use. No other rea­sons, really.
• I decided to go with the Health­Net Quick­Net Daily 2000 PPO plan. I need cov­er­age for ~90 days, and the plan had a $2000 deductible with rea­son­able emer­gency care ben­e­fits. The cost? I pay about $1.05 a day, so that turned out to be ~$90 total. Hey, that’s reasonable.
• I ran through the online appli­ca­tion which wasn’t involv­ing at all. You barely need any paper­work on hand to fill it out. I sub­mit­ted my appli­ca­tion in 15 minutes.
• Within two days I got a noti­fi­ca­tion say­ing that I had been approved for the plan. Here’s a tip: check your spam folder for mes­sages. Unsur­pris­ingly, email with “insur­ance” in the sub­ject line and body gets flagged pretty eas­ily
• Health­Net just sent me a pol­icy packet a few days ago, and told me to wait for my cards to arrive in the mail.

So, that’s the end to a rel­a­tively pain­less process. Many of you have been super help­ful with some tips on short term insur­ance. Hope­fully they’ll be of some use to you (espe­cially you grad­u­at­ing seniors!):

• If you were cov­ered under your par­ents’ insur­ance, check with their employer if there is a grace period. Thanks, Bowen!
• You can check to see if you are eli­gi­ble for a COBRA plan (essen­tially, it extends your eli­gi­bil­ity under the plan you used to be under). Thanks, Lena!
• Check with your alumni asso­ci­a­tion to see if they offer insur­ance. Cal grads, CAA offers dis­counted insur­ance plans with Lib­erty Mutual. Thanks, Charissa!
• You can pick up part-time classes at a local com­mu­nity col­lege to con­tinue your cov­er­age under your exist­ing plan. Thanks, James!
• Angela and Allie rec­om­mended Blue Shield plans, Tonik in particular.
• Laura points us to the SHIP web­site to com­pare cov­er­age plans and dis­cover how you’ll be affected as a SHIP par­tic­i­pant after graduation.