i recently resigned from my job and my new job does not offer a group health insurance so for the time-being, i will be signing up for COBRA from my old job. my wife and son have been overseas for the past 3 years and were not living with me so i did not bother to include them to my previous existing group health plan (BCBS MI). my wife and son plans to join me soon, probably within the month. to complicate matters, my wife is pregnant. BCBS have advised that I can only add them on in June or July during open enrollment. on top of that, she still needs to go through the 6-mos waiting period. this would obviously mean she won’t be getting any coverage well past her due date. the question is: is there any other way of going around this? can I add my spouse and son directly to COBRA on their date of arrival without waiting for open enrolloment?
We are not familiar with any way around this. Under Federal law, insurance companies are provided this open enrollment guideline for their protection – as well as the pre-existing waiting condition rights. If an employee could elect when to enroll dependents on a group plan, without any waiting periods, nobody would insure their dependents until they had a specific need for the insurance. Insurance premiums are high enough already. You can only imagine what they would be without these federal protections.
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