What Is Open Enrollment Health Insurance?

Video Transcript

"This is John Pinelli, financial representative, talking to you today about open enrollment in health insurance. If you work for a large company or even a small company, and you have a group health benefits package, typically, there is what's called an open enrollment period for that group plan. Now, what this means is during this time period, typically once a year, you will have a time of about one or two months, to make any changes, add additional dependents, make any sort of changes that you would need to make to your existing benefits. This could be health, disability, all the benefits that are typically offered through your work. Now, they offer this enroll...open enrollment period typically only once a year, and it's typically only a couple of months because they don't want people constantly changing their benefits package through work. They want to be able to sort of consolidate it during this specific time period of the year, and then after that, the people are sort of locked in for that entire year. So the open enrollment period -- if you have any changes that you need to make to your existing benefits coverage through your work, the open enrollment is really the time period that you would be able to do so. Anytime other than that, you're not going to be able to make too many drastic changes to the benefits that you are provided with. So this has been John Pinelli, financial representative, talking to you today about open enrollment health insurance."