Insurance Plan Was Cancelled Retroactive To The Day Before My Daughter’s Birth

Location: Arizona

My wife gave birth to our daughter about two months ago, everyone is healthy and everything was great. We were told that our daughter would be on my wife’s insurance for 30 days but we would have to have a plan for her after that. Neither of us had access to insurance through work at the time, so we added her to my wife’s application on the healthcare marketplace and received a notice that we were going to be contacted by our state’s reduced cost healthcare agency.

Fast forward to day 29 and still no contact from the agency, so I called the marketplace to try to figure out a stopgap until we could get our daughter on the reduced cost plan. The first representative I spoke to had me remove my daughter from my wife’s plan and start a separate application for her, skipping cost saving measures so it wouldn’t refer us to the agency again. In doing this, they also figured out that I had mistakenly reported my VA disability as income when we were filling out my wife’s application, so they fixed it and now my wife would also be referred to Medicaid. The representative confirmed at least three times that my wife would not lose her coverage until we had a Medicaid plan for her, but shortly thereafter we received an email from the insurance provider saying that they canceled the plan retroactive to the day before my wife gave birth due to member request. We called the marketplace again and they told us to take it up with the insurance provider, and the provider said they had no record of us ever having a plan this year.

Now we’ve received at least $25,000 in bills from my wife’s OBGYN, the hospital and about every doctor in between. Is there any legal recourse we can take? There is no way we can pay these bills and this is just the latest step in about 10 months of being screwed by our insurance.

Edit: I should clarify that my daughter being insured is not the issue, she is covered. The issue is that the insurance provider has canceled our plan prior to the date of the major medical expense unprompted.