Changing health insurance through marketplace

Factual Questions
1

Here’s the situation:

  1. Current health insurance was obtained through the health insurance marketplace two years ago

  2. Set up automatic monthly drafting of payments from checking account to company A at that time

  3. Have obtained new health insurance from a different company (Company B), again going through the health insurance marketplace, with coverage effective January 1, 2016

  4. Have paid the first premium for January, so the new coverage is in effect, bound, locked and loaded

Here’s the question:

Does company A automatically get notified by the marketplace that coverage is being changed and that they will not be providing coverage after January 1, so that they do not automatically withdraw the January premium?

Or is it incumbent on the insured to contact Company A to terminate coverage effective January 1 in order to stop the premium withdrawals?

2

I, for one, have no idea, and yet I think I can offer a word of sage generic advice: Don’t trust nobody but yourself!

Whether the marketplace or anybody else is supposed to notify Company A, I for one would never trust it to happen – even if some official told you so. (Unless, possibly, you have it in writing or it’s explicitly stated on the official web site or some such.) If it were me, I’d make damn sure to notify Company A myself.

3

When my husband did this last year, he called Company A, who told him to just stop paying premiums, and that this would cause them to cancel the policy. That’s all we did - no paperwork or anything else. But yes, we stopped making the payments. If we hadn’t, I assume we’d still be paying both companies.