Search Results for: covered california

I Lied About Covered California Open Enrollment

February 21, 2020 By Kevin Knauss Leave a Comment

I was in attendance at a Covered California meeting in Sacramento where agents asked if Covered California was going to publicize the individual mandate penalty in their marketing campaign for open enrollment. Executive Director Peter Lee told the audience that Covered California marketing would focus on the new California Premium Subsidy and not the penalty. But now, Covered California is using the argument that thousands of people don’t know about the penalty, when they are in charge of making California residents aware of the individual mandate penalty.

What is Covered California? FAQs for Individuals and Families

February 14, 2020 By Kevin Knauss Leave a Comment

Is Covered California the only place to buy health insurance? No. You can buy a plan directly from one of the health insurance carriers available in your region. But there will be no subsidy to lower the monthly premiums. Enrollment into a health plan directly from the carrier is called off-exchange, as opposed to purchasing a plan on-exchange through Covered California.

Medi-Cal Won’t Enroll You In Covered California

January 6, 2020 By Kevin Knauss Leave a Comment

If Medi-Cal makes any changes to your account through Covered California, and you have family members who are in a private health plan through Covered California, you need to finalize the new plan. In the above scenario, an additional subsidy was applied to lower the health insurance premium.

Has Covered California Ignored Blue Shield’s Marketing Violations?

December 17, 2019 By Kevin Knauss 1 Comment

In the spirit of Covered California and an open market place, agents should be offering information on all health plans available to the individual or family in their region. If a marketing program is designed to restrict consumer information or attempts to steer consumers into a specific health plan, the loser is the consumer. This sort of devious marketing arrangement is made even more egregious when the bait to entice a consumer is a government funded subsidy.

Covered California Changes Primary Applicant on Health Plan Enrollments

December 5, 2019 By Kevin Knauss Leave a Comment

The women who called me were appropriately irked that the change to their husbands being the primary applicant conveyed a perception that they were not qualified to be the primary account holder for the management of their health insurance plans.

Covered California Crazy Income Section

November 28, 2019 By Kevin Knauss Leave a Comment

As many people enrolled in Covered California have found out, the folks at Covered California will not talk about taxes. Most consumers have also learned the dirty little secret about the federal and state subsidies for health insurance; it’s all about your tax return. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the California Franchises Tax Board (FTB) don’t care how you estimated your income to Covered California to become eligible for the monthly subsidies. They only care about the final income number (MAGI) that entitles you to a subsidy.