Qualifying Event

Here in the United States, the month of November is a special time. It’s football season, people start getting ready for the holidays, men stop shaving, and it’s Open Enrollment month. Open enrollment is that one time of the year when everyone gets to stop what they’re doing and select their health coverage plan for the next year. We’ve usually got between 45 and 60 days to do this; if we don’t select a different health plan than what we have already, we’ll usually end up automatically getting re-enrolled in that same plan. And this is great and all, but what happens if something big happens in our lives outside the month of November that necessitates changing our insurance coverage? What if we get married? What if we have a baby? What if we have sextuplets? Surely we’re not expected to just let our six new babies go without insurance since we had the audacity to birth them in March instead of November, right?

Right. Things like getting married, having babies, adopting children, and getting divorced are all what’re known as “qualifying events,” which means they’re a big enough deal that we’re allowed to change our health insurance coverage in the middle of the year to deal with them. Want some other examples? Becoming a U.S. citizen is a qualifying event, as are moving out of state or experiencing a big change in income level, if those changes make us eligible for types of coverage we didn’t have before (caveat/warning: we had to have coverage before the move or the income change in order to qualify for these last two). Once that qualifying event happens, we’ve got 60 days to update our health coverage. If we procrastinate, we might end up waiting until November to get those changes recorded. This might not be a big deal if we just got a ginormous raise and simply want to enroll in a better health plan, but it could be a ginormous deal if we suddenly find ourselves with six new babies with no medical coverage. So it’s probably best not to procrastinate here.