Our Choice for 2019

As of January 1, 2019 we will no longer be Liberty Healthshare customers. Our experience in 2018 didn’t instill any confidence that a more complex medical situation would be covered by Liberty. And if it would be “covered” it wouldn’t be covered completely or in a timely manner. With the expansion of short term health insurance options in Ohio we saw this as a viable option. Thus, our 2019 health insurance will be the following plan from United Healthcare (Golden Rule Insurance):

Short Term Medical Plus Elite A - $2M total benefit per person, $5,000 deductible per person, 0% co-insurance and $0 co-pay after deductibles

This plan cost $3,739 for the year, which amounts to about $311 a month. This included a $20 one-time application fee. We felt this met our criteria and the fact our health care providers accept this insurance was a huge benefit. These insurance policies certainly present their own degree of risk so it’s not full proof but we’ll be happy to share our experience with short term insurance.

We still have a few posts to share more information about our Liberty experience. We feel it’s important to share all the details to anyone who may be looking at Liberty in the future. Our goal is to simply present all the facts about our Liberty experience. Whether someone chooses to work with Liberty in the future is a personal decision but at least they’ll have our details as an input.

As for canceling with Liberty? A pretty straightforward experience. You need to notify Liberty by the 20^th of your last month. We did need to report a reason for leaving which we record as follows:

“Reason for Cancellation: The administrative burden of working with a health care provider that does not bill directly to Liberty. Then the subsequent lack of clarity on where our bills stand and delay in reimbursement from Liberty. The administrative burden was extensive for just basic wellness visits so we were not confident a significant medical incident would be adequately covered. “

Interestingly enough we did see a flurry of activity with our outstanding bills after this cancellation. We still have not received our two outstanding “lost in the mail” reimbursements. We hope we’ll still be able to work with Liberty to re-send these checks after the 60 day period is up for “lost” checks.

So what happens to the blog? We still have more work to do to share our full experience and there are more details to share. We’ll also share some details about our short term health insurance experience. Stay tuned and please let us know if you have any questions!

A Check has Arrived

For those following along with our Case of the Missing Reimbursements, we can confirm that we received one of our checks. It looks like the check sent on November 21 successfully worked its way through the postal system to our mailbox. No sign of the other two checks Liberty indicates were sent. It looks like those were truly “lost in the mail”. Although it is certainly a little curious that a check sent by Liberty, to the same address, presumably using the same process, was delivered to us successfully despite the other checks not arriving.

Since I’m a naturally curious person I Googled, “how often do things get lost in the mail”. I could not find a perfect answer but most references cited somewhere south of 1%. Thus, what extremely bad luck that the checks lost in this case are for someone who decided to chronicle their entire experience on a blog (but in fairness, a blog that might not have the most impressive reach)! To be balanced it's possible that 99% of Liberty customers (per the odds) have no issue ever with payments getting lost in the mail. We’ll stay on the case and let you know when we find those missing payments!