One of my good friends (I'll call him Mike) passed away in September from cancer. It was quick-coming, and unfortunately, my friend didn't didn't share with his wife how their health insurance was set up. His spouse (I'll call her Joan) has had nothing but problems with her health insurance (not to mention other things), since his passing.
Mike and Joan were self-employed, live in California and have "Covered California" (Obama care) health coverage. Mike was the subscriber, so any changes to the plan had to be done under him. Now here's where it gets ugly. When Mike passed away, Joan tried contacting her insurance company to cancel the plan and get on her own plan. Since her social security number was tied up to Mike's plan, this was impossible to do. She even tried going on the Covered California webite to do this, but unfortunately Mike hadn't shared his user name or password with her.
Joan went phyically and talked with insurance agents. All they did, was give her misinformation. I even tried to help. I did an online chat with Covered California and they gave me some steps to try. First off, Joan was to fax (and she also mailed) them a copy of Mike's death certificate. This supposidly would flag their account and give Joan a special circumstance to start up new coverage. She did this in November, and is still getting bills/premiums for Mike. Hopefully, she'll start calling them and bugging them everyday until this gets resolved.
The purpose of this is to let you know that spouses need to share account information and passwords. Had Joan had this, she would have not gone through the extra stress that it's taken on her to get this sorted out. This doesn't pertain to just health insurance, but bank log-in information, credit cards, On-Star (another one she's having problems with), life insurance documents, etc. Absolutely anything that you can possibly think of that a surviving spouse may need to know about in the event of an umtimely death.
Had Mike done this before it was too late, Joan would have been able to have one less thing to have to worry about and deal with.
