When I applied for my new health insurance policy, I gave the insurer my credit card information. After being approved, I learned that the insurance company really doesn’t want me to pay premiums by credit card at all. They strongly prefer that I give them direct access to my checking account. Why can’t I just pay by credit card?
It took a long time, and an incredible amount of effort, for me to find an affordable health insurance plan. I haven’t actually had reason to use it yet. My hope is that when I do need to see a doctor that my insurance company won’t give me a big hassle about covering what it is supposed to cover. I’ll have to wait and see.
When I applied for the policy, I gave the insurance company my credit card information. It is pretty much impossible to apply for a health insurance plan without giving the insurer some means by which they can take money from you.
I didn’t want the insurer to immediately have access to my checking account right way because I had no idea what they would decide to charge me for premiums. I did not want to get stuck paying for a premium that turned out to be too expensive, and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of trying to recover that payment from the insurer as I cancelled the policy I couldn’t pay for.
So, I gave the insurance company my credit card information. I ended up getting approved for the health plan I applied for, and the premiums were affordable. The insurer went ahead and charged my first month’s premium to my credit card.
Problems occurred when I tried to use the exact same credit card to pay for the next month’s premium. To make a long story short, when I finally got to talk to an actual person at the insurance company, she said that they will not let customers use their automatic payment system if they are going to pay by credit card.
It seems I have two choices. I can do automatic payment if I give the insurer access to my checking account. Or, I can call up the insurance company, each and every month, and go through their computerized phone system, in order to pay for my premiums by credit card. They consider this to be “paying monthly”.
Why can’t I just use my credit card? The insurer let me use it when I applied. I feel like I have been lied to, because the insurer did accept an automatic credit card payment, and then flat out refused to do it anymore. Overall, the reason why some insurers are doing this is because they are trying to avoid having to pay the fees to the credit card companies that they have to pay when customers pay by credit card. I’m not sure how this can be legal. The better not charge me an additional fee for this!
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