I am on H1B and planning to change my job from 1st August. My new employer is a small consultancy company and doesn’t provide any health insurance. My wife is on F1 VISA and she is eligible for student health insurance plan provided by her university(which covers injury and sickness ), which is a very good plan(Gold) and cheap as well.
Is it possible to add myself to Student health insurance plan provided by the university ? Is this legal and compliant with Affordable Care Act(Obamacare) ?
No, you need to be a financial dependent unless this insurance plan insists on a certain immigration relationship between primary insured and others on the plan. I have not seen many insurance plans that want to know what your immigration status is - not usually their jurisdiction to understand the complexity of a visa status.
There was a slight error in my previous response - sorry. There is no need for a dependent relationship for insurance purposes. The actual definition is ‘primary insured’ and ‘secondary insured’. The only requirement is that primary (your spouse) and secondary (you and any children) must have a relationship (spouse or child mostly and in some international cases also parents). The latter simply means that you can’t tag a friend or neighbor onto the policy.