Biden administration to ACA enrollment assistors: Please credit yourselves

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Please add my 13-digit ID

CMS is apparently working to redress the Trump administration’s attack on the effectiveness of the nonprofit enrollment assistors chartered by the ACA and partly funded by the federal government.

Earlier this week CMS sent this memo to enrollment assistors:

The memo spells out the rationale for ensuring that navigators, CACs and EAP, who have no direct financial incentive to credit themselves on marketplace enrollments they facilitate, do so anyway:

Including your assister ID will help the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to better understand the support that the assister community provides and continue to improve the consumer experience….

Understanding your reach as an assister is important to enhancing the support CMS provides you and the consumers you assist.

There is a long history behind this exhortation.

What I've learned as an ACA assister

This Open Enrollment period I've been volunteering a few hours per week as a Certified Application Counselor (CAC) for the ACA marketplace, at an office in Newark, NJ. I haven't had as much experience as I would have liked, but here, very generally, are a few things I've learned.

• The government could save a lot of money by opening Medicare and Medicaid to all legally present immigrants*.  Marketplace premiums for Medicare-age immigrants are sky-high -- and often paid entirely by the federal government. Oddly, marketplace plans may actually be better than traditional Medicare for elderly immigrants -- if they stay in network, e.g., if their middle-aged children can find them in-network providers. That's because marketplace plans, unlike traditional Medicare, have an out-of-pocket maximum. Then again, dual eligibles would be better of Medicare/Medicaid.


• Similarly, legally present immigrants with Medicaid-eligible income but subject to the 5-year bar for Medicaid eligibility cost the government more in marketplace plans than they would in Medicaid (as does anyone; see Private Option, Arkansas). They would also be better off in Medicaid -- the out-of-pocket costs attached to silver plans, even with strong Cost Sharing Reduction attached, are a high bar for people with Medicaid-eligible incomes.