
Ask HN: How to get temporary health insurance in America? - nkoren
I&#x27;m an American citizen but I&#x27;ve been living in the UK for the last 10.5 years. I applied for permanent residency, but the Home Office has denied it and given me 7 days to leave the country. (Long story short: if you travel abroad more than 8 weeks per year -- even if it&#x27;s for the express purpose of finding export opportunities for UK businesses -- then the Home Office will say you&#x27;re ineligible for permanent residency. Even if that travel was mostly to find export opportunities for UK businesses, and you have a thick packet of endorsements from other branches of the civil service saying that the work was in the national interest.). So I&#x27;m being bounced back to America. I&#x27;ll be able to return to the UK via a different mechanism after about 4 months, and in the meantime will be couch-surfing around Silicon Vally.<p>I&#x27;ve got a great network of friends there, so no worries on that account. But I <i>am</i> worried about health insurance. I can&#x27;t get traveller&#x27;s insurance as though I were a UK resident, since I&#x27;ll no longer be a UK resident. And all the US-based options seem to require me to have a fixed address and possibly wait until October for enrolment. I&#x27;ve found one provider of temporary health insurance, IHS, which is not ACA-compliant, and whose online reviews are <i>entirely</i> one-star, with not a single person reporting that they were able to successfully file a claim through it.<p>So... what are my options? Aside from &quot;be rich&quot; or &quot;don&#x27;t get sick&quot;?
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chrisbennet
Sorry to hear of your predicament. Have you looked into HMOs yet? The
insurance situation is pretty horrible in the US now. Even having “good”
insurance is no guarantee of not getting a large bill since hospitals employ
outside of network doctors and you have no control over that.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/16/many-get-hit-with-
surprise-o...](https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/16/many-get-hit-with-surprise-out-
of-network-bill-after-emergency-rooms-study.html)

