Individual and group health insurance policies can be terminated essentially at any time by the policyholder. The correct manner is to send in a written notice of termination to your health insurance carrier that states the date of termination. Generally the date of termination should be for a date after you are sending in the termination notice. For example, you send in a letter on June 5th notifying the insurance carrier of your intent to terminate coverage effective July 1st. Attempting to terminate your coverage in a retroactive manner is more problematic and should be avoided if at all possible. First of all, if premiums have already been paid for the period you are wanting to backdate your coverage to the insurance carrier will be within their rights to hold on to your premium and to check if any claims activity has occurred during that period. Even in this electronic age a claim may not be filed immediately after services are rendered and the insurance carrier has to be mindful of this lag time. For this reason a request for a retroactive termination will certainly be delayed and if any claims activity came in during that period the request for a retroactive termination would most likely be denied and granted for the fist of the next month.
Then there is the less graceful way of cancelling your coverage and that is simply not to make your premium payment. Failure to pay is a violation of your individual or group contract terms and will lead to contract cancellation by the insurance carrier. I do not recommend this approach as it is bad personal and/or business practice. Also, most individual health insurance contracts and an increasing number of group health plans are set up on an automatic bank draft basis. Failure to provide a notice of termination will not stop this automatic draft from being drawn from your account. Sometimes people put a "stop pay" order for the draft on their bank account, for which you have to pay the bank a fee, and then from the insurance carrier's perspective when they attempt to make the monthly payment draft this is no different than getting a bounced check so they will still attempt to collect payment while adding a late payment charge onto the premium. This situation can get quite messy and end up taking more of your time to resolve than simply sending in a termination notice.
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Then there is the less graceful way of cancelling your coverage and that is simply not to make your premium payment. Failure to pay is a violation of your individual or group contract terms and will lead to contract cancellation by the insurance carrier. I do not recommend this approach as it is bad personal and/or business practice. Also, most individual health insurance contracts and an increasing number of group health plans are set up on an automatic bank draft basis. Failure to provide a notice of termination will not stop this automatic draft from being drawn from your account. Sometimes people put a "stop pay" order for the draft on their bank account, for which you have to pay the bank a fee, and then from the insurance carrier's perspective when they attempt to make the monthly payment draft this is no different than getting a bounced check so they will still attempt to collect payment while adding a late payment charge onto the premium. This situation can get quite messy and end up taking more of your time to resolve than simply sending in a termination notice.