Applying for Health Insurance

December 09, 2014

My mission for today was to apply for health insurance for next year through our state health exchange website. Last year I went through this process and ended up calling the call center to help me through the process because it was confusing. Most of the questions are designed to be easily answered by people with simpler life situations. They know what their job is next year and live in a suburban house with their children. I however am a millennial that lives at home and I have no idea what I am doing for work next year as I continue to apply for things. I do not quite fit into the box they designed.

Today I made it to the point where I had to arduously interrogate my parents for their information because you have to apply as a household. This is in spite of the fact that both of my parents have insurance. While the website itself is not difficult to use, much of the language around the application is ambiguous as it applies to specific situations. For example it asks when income ends but isn’t clear whether that end date should be the date that it finishes accruing or the date it finishes actually paying out. Meanwhile I’ve had to go back and research quite a bit of my own financial information relating to student loan deductions.

I now realize that my bias against dealing with paper is coming back to bite me as there are many paper documents that would be useful to access if they were scanned into Evernote. I typically use TurboScan on my iPhone to scan documents but it can be slow for larger volumes, so now I am considering moving to a ScanSnap. I suppose I could get more hanging folder boxes and just keep paper records there until I am ready to scan them with my iPhone, but they take up space and are not as easy to use.

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This work by Matt Zagaja is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.