I'm planning on my last day to be December 1, 2019, in order to get employer coverage for all of 2019, and then ACA coverage in 2020.
My main problems:
- we will be applying to go from well above the subsidy thresholds to very little income where you not only get premium subsidies but also some fat CSRs
- we will be moving to another state B at some point in January 2020, but in December and January we will be bouncing around with no real address
We don't have family in either A or B that could get our mail in the interim period. We really, really do not want to leave a papertrail in the states where do have family.
So essentially we need to convince everyone in the policy issuance chain that we're suddenly low-income and live somewhere where we haven't really moved to yet. I don't really care about not getting the tax subsidy upfront so long as it gets correctly reconciled during tax season. However, I am quite concerned about the system shitting the bed and flat out refusing to cover us because we're in a floating nomad state for a couple of months, or refusing to give us CSRs. My understanding is that the CSRs do not get reconciled, and with our expected consumption of health services, we're talking about a difference of many thousands of dollars.
I see two possible plays:
1) Leave work on December 1 in state A, apply on healthcare.gov on December 2 (during open enrollment) for coverage in state B starting January 1, and hope it gets issued.
2) Leave work on December 1 in state A, ride the magic COBRA 60 days lookback period in case anything happens, move to state B on January 15, apply for coverage on January 16 as a special enrollment period, and hope they quickly issue the policy to start on February 1.
Play #1 is risky because they may say we're not a resident of state B yet, and may refuse to enroll us.
Play #2 is risky because they may require more documentation and not issue the policy in just two weeks. Also, if we need to trigger the COBRA fallback because I get hit by a bus in January, we're stuck with COBRA for all of 2020.
Has anyone applied for coverage in a new state ahead of their move? Do they require proof of residence or can it be all done electronically? We plan on getting a blue PPO with a nationwide network, but for a bunch of reasons it's vital that the policy gets issued without delay.