About Us

Why this site exists

Short term health insurance sits in an odd spot: it is cheap to quote, hard to compare, and the fine print does a lot of the pricing work. Someone leaving a job, waiting out an ACA open enrollment window, or covering a gap before Medicare eligibility usually has days, not weeks, to figure out what a plan will actually cost and what it will skip. This site exists to shorten that research, starting with a calculator and a set of guides built around the trade-offs specific to short term coverage rather than health insurance in general.

Who writes the guides

Naomi Foster covers the pricing and coverage-rule guides on this site. Her pieces work backward from what a plan excludes, since the exclusions matter more to the final decision than the headline premium. She checks plan documents and state rules directly rather than summarizing other sites, and updates a guide when a rule or a rate range changes rather than on a fixed schedule. Our full sourcing and correction process is on the editorial standards page, and background on Naomi is on the authors page.

How the numbers are built

The calculator on the homepage models plan duration, which by federal rule can run from 30 days up to 364 days depending on your state, along with deductible level, benefit cap, and applicant age. A handful of states restrict or ban short term plans outright, and those restrictions are called out in the guides that cover them. A healthy applicant in their late twenties on a high-deductible plan can pay under $100 a month, while a 55-year-old choosing richer benefits will pay several times that. The ranges come from published rate filings and pricing surveys, not from a single insurer's list price.

Who owns this and how it makes money

Short Term Health Insurance Cost is published by Encore Editorial; Chris Terry is the publisher of record. The site is not owned by or affiliated with any insurance carrier. Some quote links on this site pay us a referral fee if you request a quote through them, which is disclosed next to those links; the fee has no bearing on what a guide says about a plan or what the calculator shows you. Nothing here replaces a conversation with a licensed broker before you buy.