Paying Fidelis Care Health Insurance In NY is Harder than You May Think
Having gone through the arduous steps and failures of setting up my Fidelis Care account after signing up through Fidelis Care, I decided I would write something brief to assist others.
Here are the basics of the process:
- Sign up for Fidelis Care through NY State of Health
- Receive a document which contains different numbers in it (the one that starts with ET is most important
- Make your first payment with Fidelis
The last step is the most tricky, especially when something changes from a prior year. The order is important as is getting the correct ET#. Since I did this today, the process is fresh in my mind.
Getting Your Information Ready
You will need the following information from NYS of Health, you can get this from loggin in or calling them:
- ET# for the new plan (not the HX#),
- Name of Account Holder at NYS of Health Online account — this will be the value you enter for ‘head of household.’
- Name, date of birth and premium for the new plan.
Don’t Trust And Verify
Get your ET# from a NYS of Health Document or a NYS of Health representative. Fidelis might have the wrong number. Earlier this morning, they gave me the wrong number and if you enter the wrong number when you sign up, well you might pay for the wrong account and have it cancelled. To be fair, it may not be their fault, but for whatever reason, they just don’t always have the information from NYS.
Making Your First Payment Is a Tricky Process But Doing It Wrong Might Result in Not Having Insurance Coverage
Here are the steps. Follow these to the tee and you should be good.
- Go to Fidelis Care, but don’t sign up for an account. Fidelis calls this their “portal.” (Again there are different instructions if you arent making changes to any of your coverage from the last year).
- If you are signed in, sign out. When I signed out this morning, it didnt work. So I swithched to Firefox browswer, from a chrome browswer. You might have to do the same.
- Go to Fidelis.org. DONT SIGN IN. I’m repetitive because it doesnt make sense, but this is how it works.
5. Click on Make a payment near the bottom of the page.
6. Enter your ET numbers. That’s the “easy” step.
PAY ATTENTION TO THE NEXT IMPORTANT DETAILS
7. Head of Household refers to the person who has the account with NY State of Health that signed up the new plan. For example, say I set up a NY State of Health online account and signed her up for the Bronze Plan (and signed myself up for a different plan — or even if I don’t have insurance) since, I own the NYS of Health account, I am the head of household, not my wife. Again, THE PERSON WITH THE NYS STATE OF HEALTH ACCOUNT IS THE HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD.
8. Member Information is where you enter the new account information. In our example, it is my wife.
THE NEXT STEP IS VITAL.
9. Provide a DIFFERENT EMAIL for the new account, than the one currently in use for your Portal Account and check off “Email me…” Again, this seemingly makes no sense since you already have a portal account, why not just add it to the existing one? I’ve been there. Done that. And lived (barely) to tell the consequences. Long-story-short, Fidelis is not set up to do this. If they are, they aren’t aware of a process that works.
10. The next page will ask for payment information. Enter the exact balance, and make payment. Provide payment details. You will get a message that it will take 3 -5 days to process, but that’s not accurate. You will receive an email from payspan_noreply (payspan_noreply@fideliscare.org) within minutes. If payment doesn’t go through, and for some reason it seems to happen often, you will receive an email witht the subject “Fidelis Care Payment Failure.” A successful payment with say “Fidelis Care One-Time preimums Payment Confirmation.”
Remember, just because they accept your payment, doesn’t mean that you are in the clear! If you gave them the wrong ET# they will probably still accept your payment, apply it to the wrong account and still cancel your plan! Even if you do things correctly, there is no guarantee they will do things correctly. I have seen it happen.
That’s basically a summary of the process. It requires strict adherence to the rules and following to make sure they get paid and that it is applied correctly.
Getting all accounts on the same portal
Now you are probably wondering how you can make your monthly payments. If you followed my steps above they should send you an email you to set up a new Fidelis portal account, which can be used to set up automatic payments, make monthly payments. When you get that email, you need to follow instructions to set up that account.
You Must Keep Head of Household Account and Merge the New Account into the Head of Household Account
It’s straightforward if you are signing up for the first time. A little more complicated, if you have just established another account for a different plan. If that is the case, you still have to go through the steps to set up a new Fidelis portal account. Then you must call Fidelis to merge the existing accounts.
If this step goes wrong, you may find yourself without a way to make any payments for the new or existing account. When you call Fidelis, if you are lucky you will get a representative that knows how to do it. Don’t assume they know. If it sounds like they don’t know, they probably don’t. Like most companies, there are many great representatives there, but there are definitely ones who are well intentioned that struggle with this process. Either call back or ask to speak to a supervisor. It’s too important to mess up after all the work you have done, to make a payment to them.
Getting insurance is a sometimes a painful process. I’m not sure why it is such an unfriendly process for those who are trying to get an insurance company expediently paid. Unfortunately, if you don’t do it, the consequences may be extraordinary. Hopefully, this helps make the process a little less taxing for others.
