A Certificate of Coverage will show proof of prior, continuous health insurance coverage to your new health insurance carrier. The document typically contains the names of all insureds along with their dates of birth and the effective and termination dates that they were insured under the prior insurance plan.
All private health insurance plans have a mandatory 12 month wait before pre-existing conditions are covered unless you can prove that you’ve had at least 12 months of continuous coverage with another carrier with less than a 63 day gap in coverage. When you provide us with the Certificate of Coverage from your prior plan, the new health insurance carrier must waive the 12 month pre-existing clause on your new policy.
You can easily obtain a Certificate of Coverage by calling the customer service number of your old insurance carrier. In most cases, they can fax it directly to you or mail it to your home address. Once it arrives, simply forward that document to us and we’ll make sure it’s applied to the new policy.
Please note, that while this document will force the new carrier to waive the 12 month pre-existing clause, it will not get you out of an exclusion waiver. Some health insurance companies will exclude certain pre-existing conditions from a policy for a certain period of time. The only way to avoid this is to apply with only those carriers that currently do not use exclusion waivers in Texas. Currently, those carriers are Aetna, Cigna and Assurant Health. All other carriers can and do use exclusion waivers in certain situations to avoid having to pay routine costs associated with certain pre-existings.
Not all pre-existing conditions will result in an exclusion waiver, so please ask us at www.selectedbenefits.com which Texas insurance carrier(s) would fit best for your given situation before making a decision.