Anna Letsos, a 48-year-old consultant in Chicago, picked short-term insurance for herself and her family this year, instead of an Obamacare plan. To get around the three-month limit, she purchased four plans to run back-to-back, a practice called stacking. Letsos picked the plan to preserve access to the top hospitals and doctors in her hometown.
Instead, she’s been stuck with surprise bills and mounting costs for services she thought the plan would cover but hasn’t.
“I don’t know what the rules for the game are, and clearly no one is going to tell me,” said Letsos.
Letsos received a mammogram in February, thinking the bill for the test would be picked up by her insurer, National General Accident & Health. Mammograms are one of the preventive screenings that health insurers are required to cover under Obamacare, but the same rules don’t apply to short-term plans.
Instead, the insurer has yet to cover any of the cost, leaving the family paying about $800 a month in premiums to keep a plan she says is inadequate. The company has also requested to review five years of her medical history before paying for her care.
“It’s not really covering what I need it to cover,” she said.
National General Accident & Health, a unit of New York-based National General Holdings Corp., didn’t respond to requests for comment.
‘Skinny’ Plans
Short-term insurance plans are time-restricted for a reason, according to Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. They don’t cover enough to qualify as real insurance, are loosely regulated and don’t always include coverage for pre-existing conditions, she said. The plans also are able to charge a higher rate based on a person’s health status, and usually don’t include coverage for such things as maternity care or prescription drugs.
“It’s very much a buyer-beware situation,” she said.
Still, for customers who don’t qualify for insurance subsidies and have seen their plans rocket up in price, the short-term options can be a risk worth taking.