The Exciting World of Insurance and Vehicle Registration

Blake writes:
Relocating to another state entails a fair bit of paperwork and administrative busywork. Old accounts must be closed, new ones opened. Dozens of change of address notices must be sent out. Vehicle registration, voter registration, bank accounts, credit card accounts, investment accounts, insurance, utilities – everything is affected. And when the state you're relocating to is thousands of miles away out in the middle of a large body of water the challenge of getting the changes made seems magnified.

Changing our health insurance plans was one of the most important tasks. Fortunately, despite the well-publicized botched rollout of Obamacare, the program is working for us. Hawaii has its own state-run health insurance exchange, which by some rankings was the worst in the nation back in October when this all started. Its Executive Director was forced to resign last December. But, like the national program, the glitches are slowly getting fixed and people are getting signed up. Here in Hawi there are even rural outreach kokuas (counselors/aids) who help folks sign up for health insurance and other community services. We were happy to take advantage of their help.

First we had to get denied for Hawaii's expanded Medicaid coverage, than reapply for coverage with partial financial assistance. (Why the two systems can't talk to each other I have no idea). The amount of financial assistance you qualify for is based on your projected income, which for us will be low this year as we concentrate on building the house. Next year, when I'm back to painting and Deborah has her skin care and vacation rental businesses up and running we'll be making more and therefore will have to pay more, which is fair. But for now we're delighted to cancel our crappy high deductible health insurance with Regence Blue Shield in Washington State, the premiums for which had been increasing steadily year after year until we were paying $800/month for something that hardly covered anything. Now we have significantly better coverage with Kaiser-Permanente in Hawaii and, thanks to the subsidies, we're only paying $100/month! Obviously, that's a huge savings.

Getting our vehicle over here was another big task. We bought a truck back in Washington just before Christmas to bring over here, which seems crazy except that trucks are priced at a premium in Hawaii and the selection is limited. It costs about $1100 to ship it over from Seattle and takes about 2 weeks to the Big Island. It gets shipped to Honolulu first, then gets barged to Kawaihae on our island, which is only 18 miles from Hawi, but we couldn't pick it up there. We had to wait for it to go overland to Hilo on the opposite side of the island (76 miles from Hawi) where we could pick it up. After dealing with insurance, inspections and registration we now have our excellent 2009 Nissan Frontier with Hawaii plates. Now we feel somewhat official. Next up: drivers licenses...

(Photo from the Kohala Mountain News.
ROSI stands for Rural Outreach Support Initiative; these ladies were great)

Hawaii plates!