Lost my job and benefits end of June. Decided to take advantage of the "free" time during summer since my wife had already lost her job, and take our two young kids on a road trip through the Southwest in September, before they headed back to school. The tiny company I had worked for had good insurance but as COBRA it was far too expensive, so we found a barebones catastrophic health insurance policy from NUFIC we could afford on unemployment (they called themselves "Essential Health" in the material we saw but the policy was issued by NUFIC).
We bought the policy on July 31 before we left. Essential Health said we would get a copy of the policy in the mail and by e-mail, and could cancel any time we wanted. We never saw a policy.
Called Sept. 5 to ask about it and the customer service rep. Promised again to mail it to our home. Not only did we not receive anything about the policy before we left, we've never received any policy info in the mail or via e-mail from them at all, and it's been six months. But that didn't stop them from taking our money.
By September we were thinking, if they can't even get us the policy, what are the chances they'll be worth anything if we have to make a claim? So we called to cancel on Sept. 20. From then until now (early February) we've been going hard at it to find jobs and haven't spent much time going over our bank statements. Today my wife noticed we were STILL PAYING Essential Health $39.95/month for the worthless policy we canceled over four months ago.
Why is it worthless? Because it only covers "accidents". On our trip my son had a painful infection in his gum from some meat he didn't get out of his teeth. We paid 100% of the cost because it wasn't an "accident."
Interestingly enough, the website says NUFIC is an AIG policy. So not only are they ripping us off by our paying them for non-insurance, they're also taking EVERYONE's tax dollars to get "bailed out" of the Great Recession. Great system they've got, isn't it?
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