Protection From HIPAA When Changing Jobs
It is not uncommon for people to continue working in their current jobs simply because they are unable to afford the risk of losing their insurance coverage, especially if they have a family member who is suffering from a medical condition. Previously, new insurance plans included a clause that allowed insurance companies to exclude known medical conditions for a certain length of time or altogether. The HIPAA was enacted by Congress in 1996 in order to help address this issue. Title One of the HIPAA provides protection for health insurance coverage for individuals who change their jobs.
If you are worried about what effects a job change might have on your insurance coverage, then you should seek the advice of someone in your human resources department in order to better understand the impact that switching jobs will have on your health insurance. While the HIPAA provides some degree of protection in such a situation, your exclusion period is dependent upon your individual circumstances, and it is still possible for you to face a long period of exclusion. The fact remains that his period would have been even longer if not for the HIPAA, however.
The best scenario would be if you have not had any breaks in your health insurance coverage, as this will mean that your exclusion period will be kept to a minimum, if there is one at all. Any break in your insurance coverage that you may have had within the past two years will have an adverse effect on your future coverage, however. A period of 63 days or more is considered to be a significant break in your insurance coverage, meaning that the coverage you enjoyed before your break will not count as credit towards your exclusion period.
For instance, you new employer offers you health insurance that has an exclusion period of 12 months, and you have been covered for the last 7 months while at your current workplace. Before those 7 months, you were jobless for a period of 65 days and thus were without any insurance coverage for that length of time. The insurance coverage that you had before those 65 days will not count as credit against your exclusion period, although the 7 months after that will count as credit against your 12 month exclusion period, thus reducing it to a mere 5 months.
While the rules and regulations that govern health insurance may be confusing to many, it is well worth the time and effort spent understanding how your present and future coverage may be affected by events in your life, especially if someone in your immediate family suffers from a medical condition. You might very well find yourself in a position where you change jobs and have to pay your medical expenses out of your own pocket for the next several months. Avoiding such a situation is simply a matter of consulting both your current human resources department as well as that in your prospective company, in order to gain a better understanding of how HIPAA will affect you and what benefits it can offer you.