I Got Married To Get My Wife On My Health Insurance. My Job's Hr Said I'm Set, But Sent Out A Second Email I Never Saw That I'm Not Set And It's Impossible To Fix. I Didn't Find Out Until A Few Weeks Later While My Wife Was Hooked Up To An Ekg And Having

The title is a pretty brief summary.

Michigan

My (28) wife (25) was previously listed as an Other Qualified Adult, which is something special my job offers for live in girlfriend/boyfriend/really close roommate. But she had a job at the time or at least Medicaid and I only worked part time, so I only had her on my vision, legal, and life - notably, separate companies from my health insurance. This is important to get out of the way.

She lost her job due to chronic pain and newly diagnosed disorders but it was a slow process getting her issues taken seriously and they have been progressive. I picked up the slack for her and we somehow survived on our own despite me trying to finish school, and for a while she had Medicaid. Something went wrong with Medicaid and she missed deadlines etc. and it just wasn't very good coverage. It was nice at the time because I was broke and couldn't afford the increased premiums but after she went off it it was just bad luck and disorganized on our part that she stayed off of. She was able to get free mental healthcare so that was a big help.

My income increased drastically + full time and I thought that it was a good time to move my insurance to add her. I moved departments at work and it should've triggered an election. They said no, it only triggers certain stuff, you can't add your fiancée until the end of the year. I was really nervous because she was uninsured and I asked if we could sign marriage licenses and trigger the election. The HR person said yeah that should do it a marriage is a midyear change or whatever they described it as.

A few weeks later, although longer than I planned, we did exactly that. I was already so stressed how long a wedding took to orchestrate (lol), because her health was getting bad. We went and got married over dinner with some friends and I sent in the paperwork and we got to work signing her up for doctor appts when they said that's all they needed from me and it would be backdated to our wedding date.

I missed one email afterwards saying the form bounced back and that some other department corrected them and (paraphrasing), "Since she is already a dependent on other insurance plans and the only change was her dependent status from OQA to Spouse we can't add her to your health insurance. We're sorry. It's just a very rare exception, we didn't mean to misinform you."

They told me that while she was hooked up to an EKG and after she spontaneously fell over at a doctor's appt and just went through panels of testing assuming she'd get her insurance updated. I felt like I just died and went to Hell instantly. I started crying on the phone with my HR department pretty much immediately.

Eventually I got a supervisor on the phone, she said they'd look more into it now that I brought forward we literally eloped to try and trigger the mid-year election because we've tried multiple ways this year to get her insured. But that was a week ago and I feel left in the dark and I haven't told my wife because what the hell do I do? Tell her we can't take care of her now that she had a health episode during her first doctor's appt in a year and to just hold off on dying until January 1st? She's all set up for January 1st but what the fuck do I do? I have legal insurance for both of us still at least but what lawyer do I even look for?

Thinking about this makes me so devastated. I should've just added her last year even though I was at the time part time and it was really crazy premiums. But I keep getting caught in these weird exceptions that aren't listed anywhere obvious so it almost feels like people making shit up as they go. It's at a point where if we apply for the Medicaid and get it figured out she's still in medical debt because of my job and I just finished a bankruptcy this year :/

I work for state government, sort of.