Employer announced 3 days before enrollment period that they will be switching insurance providers/plans- new plans are significantly more expensive and seem to offer poorer coverage

Hope someone can help provide some guidance here.

I enrolled into my employer-offered health insurance mid-year last year after my spouse lost their job and we consequently lost their health insurance. Spouse has serious chronic illness and myriad health problems. We decided to enroll in the most expensive plan my employer offered (significantly more than what we were playing with my spouse's employer-offered coverage), so we could continue using my spouse's existing providers as they were only in-network with this plan. The plan also covered most (though not all) of their existing medication. Overall, my employer's coverage was not as good as what we had before through my spouse's employer. It was a struggle working with the insurance company and we experienced a lot of delays in getting care and faced several rejections for medications and services. Getting all the medications pre-authorized was also a pain and I had to spend a lot of time going back and forth with the doctors, the insurance and pharmacies. Anyhow, we were finally feeling like we had figured things out for the most part and were reconciled to living with the coverage we had, even though it was not as good as what we'd had before.

Last week and my employer sent out emails about the enrollment period starting May 1st and asking that all employees attend benefit meetings since they will be switching insurance providers. After attending the meetings and studying the plans on offer, I found that not only are the plans significantly more expensive (about a 50% increase in cost) but they seem to offer much poorer coverage. For example, in our existing plan, all of our providers are in-network, but in the new plan, even with the most expensive option that has the widest network, several are out of network including our PCP who we really like and have been with for almost 10 years. Also, I checked the formulary and several of my spouse's medications are non-formulary and the ones that are covered are in a higher tier, which means higher copays. All in all, it seems we are being asked to pay more money for worse benefits.

It all hit me like a ton of bricks, TBH. I wish they had given us more than a couple days notice before the enrollment was scheduled to begin so I could look at other options, but now it seems like we just have to accept poorer coverage for more money. We don't want to have a gap in our coverage, but the enrollment period ends May 14th which doesn't seem like enough time to research and look at other options. Is there anything that I'm missing here or options that I'm not thinking of?

submitted by /u/SaucerPeach
[comments]