Update on Changing Health Plans

**Disclosure: This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of United Healthcare. All thoughts and opinions, as always, are my own.

Remember when I wrote about my experience shopping for health care? It’s been awhile and lots has happened since then so I wanted to update you all on our status.

Baby Awesome was born at the end of December. As I mentioned in my previous post on shopping for health care, we have spent the past several months shopping for a new health care plan and now it’s time for us to make a decisions on whether or not we are going to change our health care plan for 2015 during the month of January. We were supposed to have everything figured out by January 1st, 2015 but because we recently had a qualifying life event we were given some more time to figure our situation out.

Now, what is a life qualifying event that allows you to change your insurance plan outside of open enrollment? Per the video on the UHC website, it’s one of the following:

• Marriage
• Birth of a Child
• Adoption
• Divorce
• Other life qualifying event – change of employment, etc. This varies based on your health care plan and situation

For us the qualifying life event was the birth of Baby Awesome! So our decision making period has been extended from January 1st to January 30th, 2015. Woo hoo! We are still in the process of deciding what we are going to do and if we are going to stick with our existing plan or change to a new one. Now that we are a family we have a lot more to thing about when it comes to health care! Since I am self-employed I don’t have an HR representative I can contact to get more information on this process so I’ve found the information available on the United HealthCare website to be really informative. The videos are short and easy to understand and underneath each video they have an overview of what the video covers and a transcript so you can review everything and make notes.  This is one of the many reasons I love the internet – we have so much information available to us at our fingertips!

We are going to be making a decision by the end of the month so check back and see what we end up deciding to do!

What about you? Do you feel overwhelmed by the open enrollment period when it comes time to change or update your health care plan? Post in the comments and let me know!