OK, 2 weeks ago, on December 13, I gave up. I went to Unity Health's web page and signed up for the plan I wanted on their site. Directly through them. My application via healthcare.gov was forever lost and I wanted to make sure everything was good for the December 23 deadline.
I heard nothing for several days until I got a letter in the mail from Unity dated December 19. It stated that they just needed a few more items to complete the application. I went to the address they said, www.unityhealth.com/enroll and entered some numbers from the letter. There was a payment button which did nothing when I pressed it other than briefly show a progress bar. It turns out, that my pop up blocker was blocking a pop up. It would have been nice if the Unity page with the button would have warned me that I might want to enable pop ups.
Anyway, after switching to FireFox from Chrome, I was able to get the pop up. I paid for my first month's premium. I think, at least. I got no feedback.
Until today.
Unity called me. They had 2 applications for the same policy. One from healthcare.gov and one from their own website. She told me I would need to cancel one. OK, let's cancel the healthcare.gov one. She said that it would be a whole lot easier if we canceled the direct application. I explained that I got a letter a few days before and I had already paid for the one I applied for directly. No, she said, I had actually paid for the healthcare.gov one. I did? When did it arrive. It arrived on the 13th--of December.
Oh! I applied on November 8 and the application showed up on December 13. Wow!
Anyway, she said I would need to withdraw the second application and I typed up the email as we spoke with the numbers she repeated to me over the phone. She had the withdrawal request before we ended the phone call. She said that I had indeed signed up and paid for the first one.
So, something happened on December 13 that caused my application to go out after languishing on their database for a month and 5 days after the first failed attempt. It did that without notifying me that it had done so.
But I'm covered. And that's good because my first appointment is January 2, 2014.
