The commercial para-universe to the ACA exchanges keeps expanding

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Georgia looking peachy to web-brokers

More or less simultaneously with CMS’s announcement that 15.3 million people had enrolled in health plans via HealthCare.gov through December 15, HealthSherpa announced that 6.1 million of those enrollments were effected through its platform.

I’d like to revisit what that market share tells us about how people are getting coverage through the ACA marketplace today. For background, a couple of points from a recent post:

• According to a CMS presentation to brokers, in HealthCare.gov states in 2023, 71% of active enrollees (new enrollees and active renewers) were assisted by brokers. 74% of new enrollees — 2.2 million out of 3.0 million — were broker-assisted. HealthCare.gov states accounted for 75% of total enrollment. In total, brokers enrolled 6.8 million of the 9.6 million who actively enrolled. (Of the 2.5 million who were passively re-enrolled, I don’t know how many were broker-assisted, initially, or in plan year 2023.)

• In HealthCare.gov states, brokers rely heavily on commercial Direct Enrollment (DE) or Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) platforms, which can process enrollments with subsidies (EDE directly; DE via a redirect to hc.gov for the application processing and then a return to the DE platform for plan selection). 81% of active broker-assistance enrollments are via DE or EDE, according to the CMS presentation. In 2023, more than half of enrollments on HealthCare.gov, excluding auto re-enrollments, were via DE/EDE (5.5 million). By my count of 62 EDE entities, thirteen are web brokers, the rest are insurers. The dominant EDE is HealthSherpa, which just announced that it has already processed 2 million enrollments for 2024. In 2023, HealthSherpa claimed to have accounted for 35% of HealthCare.gov state enrollments; the company seems on track to exceed that share this year.

HealthSherpa’s preferred metric for its market share in states using HealthCare.gov (the federal platform, used by 32 states) is its percentage of active enrollments -- that is, new enrollees and re-enrollees who update their accounts and make a deliberate choice of plan. Those who are passively auto re-enrolled are not credited to the platform that initially enrolled them. If OEP 2024’s auto re-enrollment percentage matches that of 2023, (21%), the 15.3 million enrollment total includes 3.2 million auto re-enrollees. That leaves HealthSherpa with just about a 50% share of active enrollment in HealthCare.gov states through December 15.

Where and how do people find plans in the ACA marketplace?

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On October 1, 2013, the day the ACA exchanges first opened for business, President Obama promised that the exchanges would enable shopping for health insurance “the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon.”

The wretched dysfunction at launch of the federal exchange, HealthCare.gov (and to varying degrees the state exchanges as well), evident that day, immediately made that promise a laugh line. While two months of technical and political hell ensued before HealthCare.gov was marginally functional, ultimately 7 million people did enroll for 2014 coverage — in line with CMS’s projections — and the image of the insurance shopper sorting through the options on the exchanges took hold. The functioning and messaging on the exchanges improved over time — though the proliferation in recent years of barely-differentiated plans complicated the task of plan selection.

In the ten years since then, I’ve written many posts about the weaknesses and strengths of the exchanges’ functionality and messaging. Do they make it easy to enter a few data points and preview plans and prices (net of subsidy) for the individual viewer? Do they adequately steer those eligible for strong Cost Sharing Reduction to silver plans? In the first cataclysm of the pandemic, did they make Medicaid availability clear? Do their decision support tools (highlighting plans likely to yield the lowest net costs) work well?

All of which might be said to obscure the fact that the unassisted enrollee navigating options via the government-hosted exchanges has become an increasingly rare bird. As insurers have reinvested in the marketplace, brokers selling ACA-compliant plans have proliferated (more than 74,000 were registered in 2023, up from 48,000 in 2019). Since 2021, the Biden administration has replenished the federally funded Navigator enrollment assistance program that the Trump administration had reduced to skeletal form (Navigator funding was cut from $63 million in 2016 to $10 million by 2018, then restored to about $100 million in 2022).