Not to complicate things for you, but if she was uninsured in December won’t she be penalized when she files her taxes. I live in MA and I would be penalized by the state also, if I didn’t have minimum insurance for a month.
In NJ, when we applied for marketplace insurance there was an agent paid by the state who helped us fill out everything and offered excellent advice.
In MA, our experience with the state marketplace has been that it has taken hours and hours of calls with them to get anything right. (No free agents to help you navigate.)
We had our crazy experiences with insurance when S aged off our plan (pre-ACA at age 22). We scrambled to figure out the best way to cover him. We tried to apply online and after completing screen after screen, we found he didn’t qualify for care due to his mild childhood asthma. We were very frustrated and worried but were able to get coverage from our local BCBS on an individual plan because he had no gaps in coverage and had always been covered by a BCBS plan. It had fairly high premium, a deductible and wasn’t as good a policy as when he was under ours but it let me sleep at night until ACA kicked in on 1/1 of the following year. (We just had it mid-Aug to 1/1. My mom thought we were nuts but it gave me peace of mind.). He never made any claims under that policy—made his appts in Jan, after he was back under our plan.
I don’t know if that is an issue in PA. I have never had to provide any health insurance info on our taxes.
I really want to thank everyone for their input here. This is a smart, well-educated group and even here there was confusion about what is available.
I ended up suggesting to D that she call a local broker that is listed on the marketplace site. Hopefully they will have more insight into what her options are.