In a bad bureaucratic state after leaving my last job and them botching unenrolling me from employer-sponsored Kaiser Plan

Here's the rundown:

I voluntarily left my job middle of March, health benefits were to end at the end of March. I assumed they did.

With my new job, I'm on a new health insurance plan with no care provider overlap with Kaiser (e.g., if I went to a provider covered by my new plan, I'd be out of network with Kaiser). I tried to make an appointment with a new doctor and learned from them that they'd need to bill to a health insurance plan that is out of network. They note my Kaiser plan is still active, and therefore they'd need to send the bill to Kaiser, which would in turn bill me for out-of-network care.

I check in with my former employer. They say, essentially, oops, we'll unenroll you, our mistake. Getting that done is a long story, but tl;dr they do. They send me photo confirmation, and I see on my Kaiser account that they did in fact unenroll me. (The group policy I was under is marked as "Terminated".)

Here's the bad bureaucratic state: a few times I received care in a region other than the region I was issued insurance for. To do that, Kaiser required that I add a region to my health profile. When I did that, they gave me a new health number, and the group listed was not my employer, but rather a Kaiser inter-regional group.

On the phone, the Kaiser rep claimed I had set this up through my former employer and in fact it could only have been set up by my former employer. (I did not, and this was false. I was even looking at my account page that had an "Add Region" option.)

Because of this–Kaiser claimed–only my former employer could unenroll me from the "Active" region, even though my former employer had already unenrolled me from the main region that this secondary region depended on to maintain its "Active" status.

So, I turned this information over to my former employer. They said, and then showed me, that they had no option to unenroll me from that region because, according to them, I only have one region tied to their group insurance, and it's the region they unenrolled me from. It makes sense to me why this wouldn't be available to my former employer: I (through Kaiser) was the one who added the additional region, not my former employer. And it seems counter to logic that my former employer would be responsible for being aware of every region in which I'd sought coverage, rather than Kaiser terminating every applicable region once the main group policy was terminated.

To add to this, even if in an emergency health situation (according to Kaiser), if I attempted to get Kaiser care in my "Active" region with my "Active" medical number, because that region is tied to a region of care in which I do not have active status, I would be billed as if I was not a Kaiser member.

The Kaiser rep submitted this to a grievance department, but the issue is this is effectively blocking me from receiving care (assuming I do not want to pay the full cost out of pocket and then be reimbursed, which I do not want to do).

Has any health care professional here dealt with this before and have any advice? I know I have to force my former employer to work with Kaiser, which I'm doing, but I'm the only one with the biggest incentive to get this done and need to know how to quarterback this.

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Edit: a word

submitted by /u/1313131313
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