The Health Certificate Fiasco
On the last Thursday of June 2024, at 8:30 a.m., we sat at our visa appointment in Washington, D.C. Two hours of sleep and adrenaline kept us all awake and alert.
In a previous post, I discussed why we hired Jackie from Family Move Abroad to help us through this process. As we finalized our paperwork, Jackie warned us that the wording of our health insurance certificate could cause issues. Our insurance agent had assured us we should be good to go, so we pushed ahead, hoping it would be fine.
Everything went according to plan. Will and I were called back into an office separately to review our paperwork, which was exactly as it should have been … except for the health insurance certificate.
Before you can apply for a Spanish residency visa, you must show you will have health insurance in place. This is usually a private policy purchased through an agent or directly through the company. There are a myriad of options, and nearly all of them will exclude any pre-existing health conditions. In some cases, if you qualify for public healthcare, you don’t have to purchase the private policy, although many people do because it offers even more options for healthcare.
We purchased a 12-month private policy, which was incredibly affordable. We paid for the year upfront. Once the policy was in place, we received an email with the certificate attached, which we presented at the visa appointment.
To this day, I’m not sure what threw off the representative during our visa interview, but the wording on the certificate of coverage raised alarm bells. They informed us we had 30 minutes to correct the error, or we would have to return for a new appointment. They had already submitted our information into the system, which is where the 30-minute timeline came from.
In a panic, we called our insurance agent. We discussed our options, and our agent made it clear that we would not resolve the issue that day. However, he would work on it and do his absolute best to fix it so we could get our visas and be on our way.
With our tails tucked between our legs, we returned to the visa representative and told them what was happening. Sympathetic to our plight but with hands tied, he got his manager, who told us we could return the next day for a walk-in appointment and an extra fee. The manager gave Will his cell phone number and told us to call or text if we needed anything else.
Deflated, we went back to the hotel room to regroup.
The rest of the day was a blur and a flurry of phone calls. Our insurance agent, whose work day should have been over, contacted someone at the insurance company to correct the wording on the health certificate. He said this was a first in all his years of working in insurance, but he was determined to fix it. Once the contact at the insurance company came through with the certificate, he forwarded it to us, and we made plans to return to the visa office the next day.
With a full night’s sleep under us, we were in the lobby on Friday morning, waiting for the visa office to open at 8:15 a.m. Fortunately, they took us back right away, and everything was in order this time–including our kids’ acceptance letters into their international school, which the visa reps said would help to strengthen our application.
By 9:30 a.m., everything had been submitted to the system. It was now out of our hands; all we could do was wait for a response.