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I changed jobs a few months ago so I had some decisions to make about my family’s medical insurance coverage. My old employer had a decent insurance plan where I had a $20 copay and the insurance covered most preventative things. My new employer, however, is a small company and only offers an HSA compatgible health plan where I pay everything up to the deductible, then they pay everything else. They pay the entire premium though, so I wouldn’t have any insurance premiums deducted from my paychecks, which would be a welcome change.

I was actually pretty excited about the HSA plan. It has a low premium, doesn’t generally cover preventative things, and has a high deductible (in the neighborhood of $2500 per person per year). The idea is that you open a Health Savings Account and put some money into it each month. The Savings Account is entirely yours, and you can earn interest on it just like a normal savings account. When you go to pay for medical expenses, you can pay for them out of the health savings account. Once you reach your deductible, then the insurance kicks in and starts covering most of the medical bills. We don’t go to the doctor much, so that should turn out to be a pretty good deal for us. The nice thing is that you can use those HSA funds to pay for things that insurance wouldn’t typically cover, like vision correction surgery, and potentially orthodontics when the kids get a little older. Once you have enough in your health savings account, you don’t really need to contributed more to it. There are also supposed to be some tax advantages that I don’t fully understand yet.

Neither I, my wife, or either of our two young kids had been to a doctor recently. The kids were both due for vaccinations and regular check-ups, and it wouldn’t hurt if my wife and I could get a standard physical too. Also, the last time that I went to the dentist, I had one potential cavity that I knew would have to be filled. So, the plan was to continue with one month of insurance through COBRA so that we could get all of these appointments covered by my old insurance, and then move over to my new employer’s HSA plan.

With COBRA, I would have to pay the entire premium. I had about $350 per month withheld from my paychecks, plus the employer contributed about that same amount. My total payment then, would be about $700/month. I figured that I would have at least $700 in medical and dental expenses with all of the doctor’s appointments that we were trying to fit in, so that made a lot of sense.

I started my new job on November 1st. Before that time I was too busy trying to tie things up at my old job to worry about getting in to the doctor. Then, when I started the new job, I was busy enjoying that and getting into the groove there. I had my dentist’s appointment before the end of November, which ended up being about $900. But by the time I started to schedule doctor’s appointments, most doctors couldn’t get us in until mid-December.

Still, I knew that four doctors appointments would come out to over $500, so it made sense to continue COBRA through December. Somewhere in the middle of that month, though I found out that my new employers insurance wasn’t as good as I originally thought. For some reason, they would only pay the premium to cover me, not my entire family, so it turns out I would still have to pay an additional $130 for their HSA plan.

I knew I could do better than that, so my employer offered to give me $150 a month to put towards any health plan of my choice. So I went over to eHealthInsurance.com and, sure enough, found a family HSA plan for about $180. With that plan, I would only have to contribute $30 per month of my own money. It has a $3400 deductible per family before they start paying 80% of the expenses. I would pay 20% until reaching the out of pocket maximum of $5k/year, then they cover everything else.

So I submitted the application for that, but it takes another 2-4 weeks for it to get approved. (Turns out you should really expect it in 4-6 weeks). In the mean time, my previous employer didn’t correctly submit the paperwork for COBRA, so the insurance company thinks my coverage has been terminated and all of these doctors that I’ve been going to are sending me bills. I should have gotten a short-term insurance plan for the month of January, but I was so sick of insurance by this time that I didn’t want to make it any more complicated. So I let the COBRA go for another month.

The end of January was approaching and I still hadn’t been officially approved for the HSA account. There is no way I wanted to pay $700 for another month to my old insurance, so I gave in and submitted an application for short term coverage on the 28th, to make sure I could cancel my COBRA insurance at the end of January. Shortly after submitting the short term insurance application (and paying the $20 non-refundable application fee), I received the acceptance letter in the mail for the HSA compatible health plan.

Argh, what a mess, but I’m glad that it is almost finished up now. I still need to pay for the past three months of insurance ($2200 total, yikes), and pay for the first three months of my new insurance (about $500). Then I need to make sure the short term application gets canceled  and I need to open an actual Health Savings Account and start funding that.  Oh, and I can’t forget to call all of my doctors and have them resubmit the claims and hope that they go through this time.

This is why I hate insurance.