A sticky ACA marketplace: Effectuated enrollment (early 2024) and Average Monthly Enrollment (2023)

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zero premium is quite the adhesive

Early this month CMS released its annual report showing “early effectuated enrollment” in the ACA marketplace — that is, enrollment by state as of February, the first month after Open Enrollment ends for the current year (2024) in the federal marketplace, HealthCare.gov. The report also shows Average Monthly Enrollment and month-by-month enrollment for 2023.

In era where, thanks to the subsidy enhancements enacted in the American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021, almost half of all enrollees are eligible for free benchmark silver coverage, the percentage of those who select plans during OEP but never effectuate coverage (e.g., by paying a premium, if one is due) continues to drop. Of those who selected plans during the Open Enrollment Period for 2024, 97% had effectuated coverage as of February.

And in an era where, as of early 2022, prospective enrollees who report income below 150% of the Federal Poverty Level (46% of enrollees in OEP 2024) can enroll year-round, Average Monthly Enrollment as a percentage of initial enrollment during OEP continues to rise. In 2016 — the year of peak OEP enrollment before the ARPA subsidies kicked in for OEP 2022 — enrollment in December was 84.2% of enrollment as of March, the first month after OEP ended that year. In 2020, the last year before mass enrollment was enabled after OEP (thanks to a pandemic emergency Special Enrollment Period in 2021), December enrollment was 94.3% of enrollment in February the first month after OEP. In 2023, December enrollment was 113.5% of enrollment in February.

The upshot: enrollment growth in the post-ARPA era is far higher when measured in terms of Average Monthly Enrollment or Early Effectuated Enrollment as opposed to OEP plan selections. The two tables below illustrate. I’ve emphasized enrollment growth since 2016, the peak year for OEP on-exchange enrollment until 2022.

Sources: Marketplace Open Enrollment Public Use Files and Full-Year and February Effectuated Enrollment tables*, available via the 2024 Early Effectuated Enrollment Snapshot (links at FN 2).

Do income estimates on ACA marketplace applications indicate large-scale "fraud"?

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 Brian Blase, a conservative healthcare scholar at the Paragon Institute, is out with an analysis of 2024 ACA marketplace enrollment (summarized in this WSJ op-ed) claiming that millions of enrollees have mis-estimated their incomes to claim benefits to which they are “not entitled.” Here are the core claims:

In nine states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah), the number of sign-ups reporting income between 100 percent and 150 percent FPL exceed the number of potential enrollees. The problem is particularly acute in Florida, where we estimate there are four times as many enrollees reporting income in that range as meet legal requirements.

The problem of fraudulent exchange enrollment is much more severe in states that have not adopted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion as well as in states that use the federal exchange (HealthCare.gov). In states that use HealthCare.gov, 8.7 million sign-ups reported enrollment between 100 percent and 150 percent FPL compared to only 5.1 million people likely eligible for such coverage, or 1.7 sign-ups for every eligible person….

Unscrupulous brokers are certainly contributing to fraudulent enrollment and the enhanced direct enrollment feature of HealthCare.gov appears to be a problem. Brokers just need a person’s name, date of birth, and address to enroll them in coverage, and reports indicate that many people have been recently removed from their plan and enrolled in another plan by brokers who earn commissions by doing so.

Blase’s core conclusions — that benefits generous enough to induce the uninsured to access them should be scaled back, and that efforts to streamline enrollment should be broadly rejected — are unwarranted, as argued below. His use of the term “fraud” is overbroad. But he does point to weaknesses in enrollment security and incentives to agent malfeasance that are reflected in enrollment data and need to be addressed.

Egregious fraud, quasi-fraud, and not-quite-fraud in ACA marketplace brokerage

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Do they print $6,400 bills?

The outbreak of large-scale agent fraud in the ACA marketplace, in which agents have switched marketplace enrollees from one plan to another without their authorization or in some cases their knowledge, or have newly enrolled people without their consent or knowledge, has agents and the trade groups that represent them up in arms. There are multiple good reasons for this: their clients are harmed (as the plans they think they’re enrolled in are cancelled), the integrity of the marketplace as a whole is compromised — and their own incomes are denuded, as their commissions are terminated in favor of a new agent of record.

Much of the unauthorized (or inadequately authorized) plan-switching and enrollment appears to be straight-out fraud, along the lines alleged in a putative class action (Conswallo Turner et al. v. Enhance Health, LLC et al.): Leads generated by ads that misrepresent marketplace premium subsidies as cash benefits, fed to agents in call centers who obtain the minimal personal information needed (name, D.O.B. and state*) to switch the enrollee’s plan (or newly enroll her) with a new agent listed as the Agent of Record, without the enrollee’s understanding or consent. (CMS requires agents to obtain consent before acting on an account, and recently clarified that mere check-box consent is “likely not be sufficient to meet…new requirements,” but that soft prohibition seems to have been honored largely in the breach.)

Egregious fraud is happening. But the ease with which agents can alter or create an account on an EDE and collect a commission, coupled with the millions of people eligible for multiple zero-premium plans, further coupled with ads that are misleading to varying degrees, suggests a broader gray area in which some agents may be misleading marketplace enrollees to varying degrees.