Congrats Grad!

If you were lucky enough to be offered health insurance through your school’s health plan, you may have noticed that your health plan terminated when you graduated. You’ve just graduated and are building your career, figuring out finances and other aspects of your life, so a very important thing to not forget about your health insurance.

Here’s what you need to know about health insurance enrollment:

When enrolling on a Covered California plan, you need to know that there are open enrollment periods.

What this means is most people usually have to wait until open enrollment to sign up for a health plan (usually in the fall of each year) for coverage effective Jan. 1st of the following year. When you lose the ability to continue coverage though your school, you’ll have to enroll on your own plan through a special enrollment period.

If you’re working and qualify for coverage on your own employer group health plan, you’ll definitely want to look into that.

And if you qualify financially, you may also want to take a look at Medi-Cal.

Involuntary loss of coverage is a qualifying life event for a special enrollment period

When you lose coverage, make sure you take note of the day that you will be losing your school’s health insurance because your 60-day special enrollment period starts on that day. If you don’t take advantage of that 60-day window, you might be locked out from having coverage until it is time for open enrollment again.

It’s time to lock in

Enrolling on a health insurance plan can be pretty daunting. You need to make sure to find a plan based on your current medical needs. For example if you’re seeing a therapist who you want to continue seeing, you need to make sure to enroll in a new plan where that therapist is in-network with. Other things to consider would be your primary care doctor, specialists, medical group, prescription medication needs, and more.

Working with a Covered California Certified Agent doesn’t cost you anything extra.

Your premium would be the same whether you work with an agent or not. I would rather you choose the right plan based on your budget and needs than to choose a wrong plan that costs too much or provides too little coverage based on your needs, ultimately leading to your plan coverage terminating because you’ve changed your mind (P.S. changing your mind unfortunately doesn’t count as a qualifying life event for a special enrollment period).

Feel free to reach out and we can help with a needs analysis to see which is the best fit for you! Call us at (626)399-7082 or by filling out a contact form and we’ll reach out to you.

We’re here to help!