Terrified that I’ve been committing insurance fraud?!?!Please help me
I’m 26 and just recently got married in December 2022. I have always been low income and qualified just fine for medi cal on my own, but I knew I would no longer qualify when I married my husband and we would make collectively like 40/45K that year (for our family of 3). I knew this and decided that I would call to cancel as soon as I got married. HOWEVER, I became pregnant with my second child, the month prior to our wedding and my mother in law informed me (with her knowledge as a former state insurance worker) that I would be covered automatically throughout my pregnancy and 1 year postpartum, so I stayed on. She told me regardless of our increase in income I would still be covered due to the pregnancy. My biggest mistake was that I never reported my marriage with medi cal because she said it wouldn’t matter the income increase.
Fast forward to last month (my one year postpartum mark) I knew I would need to call and cancel. I have tried about 6 times in the last week to get ahold of a county rep and each time I call I am either told to call back another time because their are too many callers in the queue OR I wait 3-4 hours on hold to never get my call answered and it hangs up on me when the office finally closes. After all of this I decided to look into if it was possible to cancel online somehow due to my situation and ran into information on the program my mother in law was talking about. What I have found is that it’s a medi cal program that you have to apply for I think. Although I meet every requirement on the list, I was never enrolled into this medi cal program specifically. I have been losing sleep and going down rabbit holes believing I’m going to be jailed and my life ruined because of insurance fraud I didn’t even know I was committing. Please somebody shed some light