It was nearing the end of the month - the end of the year. I received a letter from PCIP, the plan that I had in place that was going to terminate at the end of December. Since this was a government plan, and the government was aware that the ACA roll-out had been badly managed, they were offering to extend the coverage through January. But by sending in a payment you were swearing by penalty of all kinds of things that you had been unable to obtain other coverage. I figured I'd better hold on to that letter because there was still time to send in the money if I couldn't actually pay Cigna. We were now into that time period between Christmas and New Year and I still hadn't been able to secure coverage.
Mark and I went off to San Antonio for the New Year Celebration but I made sure to take the Cigna phone number and case number with me. I still needed to pay for the policy. I knew that I had until January 10th, but if I had to pay for the additional month of PCIP, I only had until January 5th, and that required sending the payment by overnight delivery to ensure they had it by the 6th.
On December 31st, I called Cigna back. They STILL showed the policy as cancelled. This was disappointing, frustrating, and annoying. I decided to call Gene, an insurance agent extraordinaire who had actually told us about the PCIP insurance and helped us obtain coverage in the past. Luckily, he answered the phone. I told him what had happened (well, not as much detail as I've shared in Parts 1 through 3) but the summary of it.
He thought the best plan was to remove the application that was in Healthcare.gov and start a new one. He advised me to set the start date on this one as February 1 and pay the additional month for PCIP. We went through the application. This time I selected a Silver Plan that would give me similar coverage to what I had with PCIP and at a similar price. By this time, Healthcare.gov had been linked up with the IRS and could base your eligibility for a subsidy on net taxable income rather than gross income. (I know that in theory this isn't a particularly good thing - but it does make the whole thing go a bit smoother.) I don't mind paying a couple hundred more if I'm going to have better coverage. This is what the ACA was supposed to do - make good coverage affordable. We successfully submitted a new application. Unfortunately, once again it was with Cigna. Gene told me to go ahead and pay it online right then and there.
I entered my credit card details for the first month's premium. Well and good. But subsequent months must be paid from a bank account. I didn't have my bank details with me. Nobody takes out of town checks, what's the point of traveling with a checkbook? There is no way I could make the payment that day. But I was going to be back home the next day and could easily do it then. Gene said that would be fine.
So we celebrated the New Year and the next day we drove back home. The first thing I did when I got in the house was login to pay for the healthcare. It hadn't saved any of the information, so I re-entered the credit card details and then entered my checking account details. I was hoping for something with bells and whistles to signal my success. But all I saw was that if I logged out and logged back in, it said "Complete". I wrote out the checks for the PCIP and took them (one for me and one for Mark) to the post office the next day. I had to pay to ship them both overnight in separate envelopes to the tune of about $20 each. (I know from prior experience with these folks they only take notice of whatever is on top. When we first applied for these policies, we sent both applications in the same envelope. Mine was the only one that got processed. We're not going through that again.)
Now, I knew from all my previous calls to Cigna that it should only take about 3 days to process the application and that I should get an email from them. I didn't anything. So on January 8th, I got back in touch with Gene. He checked into it, and it seems that my payment hadn't been processed. So on the 9th we went online and did it again. This time, I got a receipt. Now all I needed to do was wait a few days for the email from Cigna.
Will Barbara get an email from Cigna? Will she have coverage on February 1? All will be revealed tomorrow.
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