Health Insurance for a Fiancée

[Jamnan_n_Steve 17]

We picked up an inexpensive "run over by a bus" travellers insuance policy to cover the time between entry and when my plan could add her after marriage (October 8 to the first of December). The real benefit of getting added to an existing plan is that the coverage generally does not have pre-existing conditions exclusions.

During our AoS interview our IO took copies of Jamnan's coverage from her date of entry but did not comment on it specifically.

Steve from

Jamnan_n_Steve

[Rob & Monika 87]

It's dependent on your fiances policy. Mine requires us to be married and have SSN.

[afoyoswa 178]

As others have said, it will depend on your insurance plan. Mine allows a "domestic partner" to be added to my plan, but only after the domestic partnership is registered through the city ($65 plus an additional fee for certificate copies) for 6 months or longer. Given that our wedding was planned for a date about 7 weeks after his POE, this helped us exactly not at all.

Availability of short-term/catastrophic (as a previous poster put it: "run over by a bus") policies will vary by state. Mine (Massachusetts) does not permit them at all.

I didn't spend a great deal of time researching insurance plan solutions to our 7-week insurance gap, but from what I could tell, he wouldn't have even been eligible for the plans available directly to consumers due to enrollment period regulations, and any of those would have been >$400/month just for him (i.e. double the cost of covering an entire family on my insurance) if we could have even obtained one. But as others have mentioned, the other solution is to move the legal marriage date back to allow coverage through the spouse's plan. After he came down with a sore throat and it turned out that the walk-in clinics around here would have been ~$100 for an exam (in addition to lab tests, prescriptions, etc.), the choice became surprisingly easy.

[Caryh 5,206]

I added my wife to my plan at work on the Monday after our wedding. We were married 5 weeks after she arrived on a K1, and we didn't worry about the between time. She didn't have a SS number yet and they tried to insist on her having one. But I insisted she didn't need one, so they finally looked into it and discovered a SSN was not needed. I could add her because it was a life changing event, rather than waiting for the annual renewal time. Her immigration would have also been considered a life changing event, but our insurance doesn't allow domestic partners so we had to wait until after the wedding. Just note for those that assume it takes a marriage to have a life changing event, if you look into it, (or insist the person telling you its not life changing event) to look into it, you will probably find immigration events do qualify. The biggest issue is getting past some clerk's assumption because they've never done it before it must not be allowed, and getting them to look at the actual wording of the policy.