My healthcare provider / employer was too slow, now my wife is forced to keep her insurance?

Hi all,

I am in a situation where I got a new job on 9/12. I was sent instructions on how to enroll on 9/30 through my portal and enrolled same day. This was finally approved by my employer on 10/7. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I still don’t have my insurance card, nor can I login to my insurance portal. I call Carefirst – they tell me they have no record of me. I call my employer, they tell me Carefirst never received the information they sent and this just “happens” sometimes. Whatever – they resubmitted my information to Carefirst. I check my online insurance portal from this point every day until it finally becomes active on 10/31.

My wife provides proof of new insurance to her company on 10/31. She tried to do this earlier but they would only accept an insurance card as proof of new insurance. My employer backdated my insurance to October 1st which means I have to pay for weeks I wasn’t even set up with Carefirst (whatever, I can deal with this). The problem is that my wife’s company is saying she cannot use the new insurance as a life event to cancel hers because they only allow 30 days from the effective date of my insurance which was October 31st, and this was the date we received proof of the new insurance.

Are we completely SOL here? This could end up costing us thousands of dollars to continue to pay for her coverage which is actually completely useless coverage compared to my plan. Seems absolutely unfair to me that we had to provide proof of new insurance within such a small time frame when it was actually impossible to provide proof.