Last week, I went to see an insurance broker, in the hopes that she could find me an affordable health insurance policy. To my pleasant surprise, she was able to not only find one, but to help me to apply for it as well. Since then, I have been waiting for a status update from the insurance company. The wait feels long.
This blog is one of the many I have written about my continued quest to find affordable health insurance. So far, all of my attempts to do this by myself ended in failure. That is what inspired me to find an insurance broker, and make an appointment with her. She was a really big help!
My insurance broker found me not one, but four policies that looked as though I could afford them. She gave me quotes on all of them. My husband and I went over everything, and asked a bunch of questions. The insurance broker then helped me to fill out the application for a particular health insurance plan.
Since then, I have gotten two emails from the insurance company of the plan that I applied for. The first one appeared in my inbox on Sunday, April 1, 2012. I was certain it must have been some kind of April Fool’s Joke. What insurer is open, and sending email about the status of someone’s health insurance application, on a Sunday?
It turned out to be the real deal, though. It was not incredibly informative. In short, this email confirmed that I had applied for one of their health insurance policies. It was also to inform me that my application was being sent to their underwriters.
Since then, I have been waiting to hear more. I don’t really know what to think at this point. How long does this insurer usually take to put an application through their underwriting process? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing, if they take a long time to work everything out? Will I eventually get an approval letter, or will it show up in the form of an email? Will the insurer contact my insurance broker first, or both of us, or just me, when a decision has been made?
I have no answers to these questions. Just to see what would happen, I logged into the insurer’s “Application Tracker”. My hope was that there would be what essentially amounted to a rejection or an acceptance of my application. Waiting around for a decision to be made about something as important and necessary as health insurance is brutal!
Unfortunately, the “Application Tracker” didn’t have any news for me. It says:
“Your application for insurance has been received and is currently being reviewed by our Underwriting Team.”
There is nothing I can do except wait. Every day that I wait for an answer is another day that I am going without health insurance coverage.
Image by stvcr on Flickr