Click on picture to enroll.
What is short-term health insurance?
Designed for healthy individuals and families, short-term polices provide an affordable safety net while switching from one life event to another without a health plan.
If you are:
- Between jobs
- Waiting for coverage from another health plan to start
- Laid off
- Recent college graduate
- Retired and waiting for Medicare to start
- A seasonal employee
Then consider short-term insurance (but remember that most of those scenarios are qualifying events which means you’d be eligible to purchase an ACA-compliant plan instead – so check those options too.)
Emergency events are nearly always covered under short-term plans, as is hospital care, but in general, coverage is limited, so study your policy carefully.
Short-term plans don’t cover pre-existing conditions, and they typically do not cover maternity, mental health or preventive care. (They are not required to cover the ACA’s (essential health benefits)
Although their sale is not limited to open enrollment windows, short-term plans do use very basic medical underwriting to determine an applicant’s eligibility for coverage. Short-term plans also have blanket exclusions on pre-existing conditions, which means they won’t cover any medical conditions that you had before the plan took effect.
Bottom line: Temporary insurance is a low-cost option to protect yourself temporarily from unforeseen and emergency medical expenses. But it’s not a substitute for ACA-compliant coverage, and it doesn’t include the myriad consumer protections provided under the law.
Click on picture to enroll.
