The first thing you should do is to take care of the short term. Look at how you might be eligible for government programs like Medicare, Medicaid or S-CHIP.
You mustn't worry about buying a good few months worth of unemployment health insurance from one of these plans. If you buy for three months and you end up getting a new job in two, you can always ask for a refund. With these plans, they offer you short-term protection for a specific number of weeks. Not only are these plans cheap, they don't really look too hard at you to see whether they want to accept you.
In fact, that would be an excellent philosophy to hold when you're looking for unemployment health insurance. Since it's likely you'll get your job in the next few months, even if you do get an expensive health insurance plan, it's not going to be a bad thing to get the expensive stuff.
You don't have to reckon how much it'll cost you for the whole year and then the whole decade and so on. You are not going to be unemployed for a long time. You just have to think of how much it will cost you to get something like a high deductible plan for instance, if you just keep it for a couple months.
You know what a high-deductible plan is, don't you? It's where the insurance company charges you very low premium, but they make you pay something like $5000 a year as your contribution to your own medical care should something come up. If you're young and healthy, this is a plan you really should go for. You have health insurance, and you really don't have to worry about bleeding yourself every month paying a premium.
Sometimes, none of these options are open to you. Because you have a pre-existing condition. In that case, here's a good idea -try pcip.gov. It's the government's high-risk insurance pool. You don't even have to be declined by a regular insurer to be able to apply here. You can just go there.
