Short-term monthly health insurance is a temporary U.S. Medical plan that only lasts 30 to 364 days and can begin as soon as tomorrow.
It includes ER, urgent care, and doctor visits, but waives maternity, mental health, and pre-existing conditions.
Premiums range from $90 to $250 for a healthy 30-year-old in most ZIP codes.
Below, we break down the fine print, state regulations, and actual expenses so you can determine whether a stop-gap policy suits your gap month or employment transition.
What is Short-Term Health Insurance?
Short-term health insurance is stop-gap medical coverage you can purchase for one to twelve months. It advertises rock-bottom premiums, gets authorized within minutes and omits all the ACA fundamental benefits. Folks pick it up between jobs, post college, or if they skipped over open enrollment.
It’s not a replacement for a full ACA plan; consider it a spare tire, not a new engine.
1. The Basic Premise
These pay cash when you break an arm or land in the ER, nothing more. Maternity pills, therapy couches, and free flu shots stay off the tab. Carriers run light underwriting: answer ten health questions online, get a green check, and print your card.
Lie about that old back sprain and the company can reject your claim later.
2. Coverage Duration
Most states allow you to lock in three, six, or twelve months at a time. If you renew, you can extend to thirty-six months total. Idaho and Colorado, for example, limit coverage to ninety days no matter what, so read your state fine print before you count on longer coverage.
Circle the end date on your calendar since there’s no federal reminder, and one missed day can push you into uninsured territory.
3. Monthly Payments
Premiums are fifty to seventy percent below an ACA bronze sticker since the carrier avoids most expensive care. The catch is that you prepay each month in full. If you miss a debit, the plan dies overnight.
Activate auto-pay the day you sign up so a forgotten vacation balance doesn’t yank coverage when you need it most.
4. The Underwriting Factor
Insurers can decline or rate you up if you put down diabetes, cancer meds, or even a mood drug from last year. The application is three minutes, and no labs or nurse visit is required. Tell the truth: if they find undisclosed asthma after you rack up a $40k bill, they rescind the policy and leave you holding the bag.
5. Immediate Start Dates
Apply tonight, get approved tomorrow morning, and coverage clicks in at 12:01 a.m. The next calendar day. This is a lot better than ACA plans which perpetually make you wait until the next month.
Print your ID card the moment the email hits—urgent-care desks demand proof on the spot and pharmacies reject short-term cards they cannot scan.
Who Truly Needs This?
Short-term monthly health insurance works best for people who know exactly when that gap ends. If you’re between jobs, just aged off a parent’s plan, or waiting for new-hire benefits, the plan provides you with a card to present to an urgent-care clinic.
It is not for someone who needs maternity care, takes daily brand drugs, or visits a specialist for diabetes or heart failure. Treat it like duct tape: strong for a quick fix and useless as a long-term roof.
Job Transitions
COBRA lets you keep your old boss’s plan, but the bill will shock you. One L.A. Worker pays $650 a month for COBRA. A short-term bronze plan with a 10 K deductible costs about $190.
If your new company makes you wait 30 to 90 days, snatch up short-term coverage that covers emergency rooms in whichever state you’ll work. One dude I coached relocated from Texas to Denver. He chose a national carrier so a ski trip emergency room claim wouldn’t wind up out of network.
Recent Graduates
Your campus health turns off at midnight on graduation day. Once you secure a paid internship, weigh short-term versus marketplace bronze plans. If you will remain under $20,000 of income this year, Medicaid in most states is free and trumps both.
Waiting Periods
The federal government allows companies to postpone coverage of health benefits for as much as 90 days. Buy a 3 month short-term plan with the lowest deductible you can afford—$2K stings less than $7K when a broken wrist arrives!
Date your group coverage and short-term the same morning or you pay double and the short-term carrier can deny claims for overlap.
Early Retirees
Retirees under 65 who exited work at 62 use short-term to bridge to Medicare or the next marketplace open season. Every 90-day term expires with fresh health queries, and if your A1C crept up in the last quarter, the carrier can bang you out.
Set aside $3-4K in an HSA before you quit. Short-term never pays for dental crowns or new glasses, but the HSA card will.
Short-Term vs. ACA Plans
Short-term monthly health insurance is designed for gaps, not long haul care. ACA plans are the opposite: year-round contracts with federal guardrails. Here’s where the rubber meets your wallet, and our scoreboard, in the table below.
Feature | Short-Term Plan | ACA Plan |
|---|---|---|
Up-front premium | $100–$200/mo | $350–$500/mo before subsidy |
Subsidy help | None | Tax credit can drop cost to $0–$150 |
Underwriting | Health questions, denial OK | No questions, must sell |
Renewal right | Ends in 3 mo, no promise to re-issue | Auto-renew yearly as long as you pay |
Essential Benefits
ACA must cover 10 classes: doctor visits, ER, hospital stays, maternity, mental health, rehab, lab work, prescriptions, preventive screens, and pediatric dental/vision.
Short-term contracts can skip most of these or cap them at $1,000 per service. A Texas woman who buys a three-month short plan and gets pregnant in month two will likely pay the full $12,000 vaginal birth bill herself.
Pre-existing Conditions
Insurers can outright reject you if you took an antidepressant in the previous year. They can print the card but put out a rider that doesn’t pay for that old knee scope.
ACA plans are required to accept you, even though you just completed chemo. If you take a daily statin or visit the chiropractor for back pain every month, stay with ACA. The short-term underwriter is going to see it in your Rx report and either hike the rate or print ‘decline.’
Cost Structure
Sticker price says short-term wins until you enter your zip code and income into healthcare.gov. A 29-year-old in Phoenix making $32,000 has a bronze ACA plan fall from $370 to $65 after the credit, besting the $140 short-term quote.
Do your own math; five minutes can turn the equation.
Consumer Protections
ACA caps out-of-pocket spending at $9,450 for a single person in 2024. After that, the plan pays 100%.
Short-term policies can end at $50,000 or $500,000 lifetime and remain lawful. They can cancel you at the end of any 30-day block if their actuary smells danger.
Read the “limitations and exclusions” page twice—once on the train, once with coffee—since that’s where surprise denials live.
The Unseen Financial Risks
One missed step on an LA sidewalk, and you’re stuck with a $25,000 hospital bill. If your short-term plan has a $10,000 deductible, the insurer pays nothing until you shell out that initial ten grand. You still owe the other $15,000 and that’s prior to any coinsurance.
Worse yet, if the ambulance transports you to an out-of-network ER, the balance-billing door is wide open. Later, when you try to renew, the company can refuse since that new knee injury now becomes a pre-existing condition. So you’re left uninsured mid-year, barred from ACA plans until January.
High Deductibles
Typical short-term deductibles are $5,000, $10,000, and even $15,000. You pay every dime until you reach that amount, with no ACA cost-sharing reductions. One freelancer in Silver Lake established an online savings bucket called “deductible jail” and auto-deposits $850 a month so she’s not blindsided.
Coverage Gaps
Rx coverage tends to stop after a 1k co-pay. Insulin can be $600 a refill. Mental-health visits and substance-use treatment might be blank exclusions.
Print the plan’s formulary before you hit ‘enroll’. If your Lexapro isn’t on it, you pay retail.
Network Limits
They lease skinny ‘preferred’ PPO lists, sometimes half the size of Covered California networks. A North Hollywood dad dashed his son to CHLA — it was out-of-network so the insurer paid $0 and the hospital billed the rest.
Call your doctor’s billing office, provide them with the exact plan name, and request a written yes or no before you require care.
Renewal Uncertainty
If you saw a doctor for anything over a flu shot, the carrier can mark you as a risk and decline to renew. States such as California prevent you from reapplying to that same issuer for 12 months.
ACA open enrollment is in your calendar, and a short-term plan is a bridge, not a home.
Navigating State Regulations
Short term monthly health insurance isn’t sold the same in each zip code. California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, and Washington prohibit it. You cannot purchase it at any price, although you need a 30-day bridge between gigs.
Illinois, Connecticut, and Maryland permit it, but reduce the federal 364-day cap to three months with no renewal. If you purchase in Chicago on June 1, the plan expires on August 31 with no extensions and no exceptions.
More patchwork. Nine states and DC don’t ban the plans, but none are available. Why? Each of those states added additional regulations, such as required maternity coverage, no pre-existing condition exclusion, or out-of-pocket maximums.
Insurers saw the increased premium and silently departed. A 35-year-old freelancer in Portland, OR can legally sign up, but when she runs a quote, she gets nothing.
Federal law allows a short-term plan to last 364 days and be renewed up to 36 months. State law can shorten that period or add benefits the plans were never intended to cover. New York goes furthest: every policy must cover crucial health benefits, accept all applicants regardless of health, and skip lifetime caps.
Short-term carriers can’t make money on those terms, so shelves remain bare.
About: State regs If you move or travel a lot, double check the regulations. A Texas-licensed trucker who purchases a six-month short-term plan then accepts a Denver-based gig loses coverage the moment he changes his garaging address to Colorado.
The same plan is legal in Texas and is outlawed in Colorado. Residency causes the switch.
For current word-for-word rules, skip the broker sites and go straight to the source:
- CA: insurance.ca.gov
- NY: dfs.ny.gov
- NJ: state.nj.us/dobi
- MA: mass.gov/orgs/division-of-insurance
- RI: dbr.ri.gov
- VT: df Vermont
- CO: doi.colorado.gov
- WA: insurance.wa.gov
- IL: insurance.illinois.gov
- CT: portal.ct.gov/cid
- MD: insurance.maryland.gov
Bookmark the page for your state and check out the bulletins. Regulators put last-minute changes there first.
How to Get Covered
Short-term monthly plans bridge holes. The purchase is close. Four moves keep you legal and out of sticker shock: check state rules, stack three quotes, file online, then set a kill date. Bypass lead-gen ads, jolt the carrier site or an authorized agent portal right. Enter your SSN just once you display the lock icon and the “https” that shows the page is with the insurer, not a data broker.
Check Eligibility
You must be under 65, non-pregnant and terminated from Medicaid, that’s the federal floor. States like California and New York outright bar these plans, whereas Texas will let you keep one for 364 days but only if you reapply every 12.
The health form is brief— asthma, recent ER visits, cancer in the past five years— but if you fib, they can rescind the policy when you require it. If you end up on a ‘decline’ screen, you’ve still got the ACA special enrollment door open, no harm, no foul.
Compare Plans
Open a sheet, and record premium, deductible, coinsurance share, drug cap, and doc-count in network. Run three quotes: Everest, UnitedHealthOne, and Pivot.
A 30-year-old in Phoenix views Plan A at $110 a month with a $7,500 deductible, Plan B at $180 with $2,500, and Plan C at $130 but only 70 percent coinsurance. Premium plus deductible plus maybe 30 percent coinsurance on a $20,000 broken-leg bill means the ‘cheap’ plan can cost $3,000 more if you end up in surgery.
Sort by that worst-case number, not the ad price.
Submit Application
Most sites finish in ten minutes: name, DOB, ZIP, height, weight, tobacco flag. Upload a driver’s license picture if prompted — jpeg under 5 MB does the trick.
Cover the first month with a credit card, Amex, Visa or debit, so you receive an email marked “coverage active” immediately. Download the temp ID to your phone wallet and print a spare for the glove box. Some urgent-care desks still want paper.
Understand Cancellation
You have a free-look window, typically 10 calendar days, to back out with a complete refund. After that, you can quit any month, but only if you log in, thump “do not renew,” or email notice in writing.
Mum’s the word equals auto-bill. Cancel the plan the day your new job or ACA policy kicks in so you’re not paying twice. Set two alerts: one thirty days out, one day-of. Miss it and the card keeps charging despite you’re now on Blue Cross.
Conclusion
About: Short-term monthly health insurance fills a little, jagged hole. It puts cash in your pocket for a month or two, but it has big holes if you get sick. Look at your state regulations first, as some prohibit these plans and others limit it to three months. Line up the fine print next to an ACA plan: copays, drug list, and max payout. Choose the one that gives you peace of mind, not just saves a dollar. Need a bridge? Get a quote tonight, make the effective date the first of next month, and bridge into long-term coverage before the short clock hits zero.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I buy a short-term plan for just one month in Los Angeles?
Yes. California bans all short-term policies, so no carrier will sell you one inside L.A. County or anywhere else in the state.
What’s the fastest alternative if I only need 30-day coverage?
Go for Covered California. A Special Enrollment window can open the first of next month if you have a life event.
Do short-term plans count as “insurance” to avoid the IRS penalty?
No. Not MEC, so you’ll still face a state tax penalty when you file in CA.
Will a short-term plan let me keep my UCLA Health or Cedars-Sinai doctor?
Only if that provider is on the plan’s minimal PPO list. Most short plans don’t cover most of the major L.A. Hospital systems.
How much cheaper is short-term vs. a Bronze ACA plan?
Short term quotes run from $90 to $200 per month. ACA Bronze with subsidy is frequently between $0 and $50 for the same 30-year-old in L.A.