Stride Stories: Advocating for Amy Welker during an insurance company mistake
It’s hard to believe it, but anecdotal evidence from our Health Concierge team indicates that up to 10% of all health insurance applications are processed incorrectly by insurance companies. If you’re with Stride, we will help protect you from these errors. Below is one such story from our customer, Amy, who recently became self-employed.
I had a full-time corporate accounting job, but I decided to leave that job and pursue part-time accounting while building my nutritional coaching business. One of the most daunting things in stepping out of a corporate job with benefits was how am I going to figure out his health insurance thing? I thought I would just get sucked into this quagmire of phone trees, and I would never get my questions answered.
I needed to get my insurance questions answered quickly, and I heard about Stride through a podcast, so I signed up. I sent in a chat and Anna helped me work through all the iterations of how much money was I going to make next year. Having recently quit my full-time gig, I didn’t know what all my sources of income would be, but Anna was super helpful in walking me through that, and I could just email back and forth quickly with her. It was so painless.
We thought everything was squared away, then I got a call from my insurance company saying, “We have a dental insurance form for you, but you didn’t indicate what plan you wanted.” I was really confused since I hadn’t signed up for dental insurance, so I reached out to Anna and asked what’s going on?
Turns out my insurance company was trying to enroll me in dental plan not a health plan. Because of this, it was the 1st of the month and I didn’t have any health insurance. That’s when Megan (another member of the Stride’s Health's Member Experience team) got involved. She said Stride would set me up with coverage for the month – while the issue got resolved – and they would pay for it! All of this happened via email and a phone call or two. Being able to easily speak to a person at Stride made things so much easier… it’s just so difficult to navigate the individual health insurance waters on your own.
Note from our team: Here are some of the most common mistakes we see insurance companies make while processing your application.
1. Dropping information ( i.e. your apartment number), then will cancel you for non-payment when you don’t receive & pay your bill.
2. Billing you a few cents different than quoted premium, then cancel your application when they receive the wrong amount (quoted amount) back from you.
3. Name misspellings – make it hard to call in and ask about your policy.
4. Assigning the incorrect effective date.
5. Assigning the wrong plan.
If you think you might be paying too much or be in the 10% of insurance errors, bring your plan to Stride. We will check it and make sure your plan is optimal.
