What really happened to open enrollment sales?

The Obama administration recently announced a special enrollment period (SEP) for consumers who pay PPACA non-insured penalties for 2014, but eHealth isn’t sure if Web brokers can help with tax season SEP enrollment, Lauer said.

Before the open enrollment period started, some PPACA watchers predicted insurers would have trouble getting the remaining uninsured people to sign up for coverage, because many were hard to reach, hostile toward the idea of buying health coverage, or unable to find what they think of as affordable coverage.

Early in the open enrollment period, eHealth reported that only about 25 percent of its shoppers were uninsured before they started shopping for coverage.

Rick Lindquist, president of Zane Benefits, a company that sells an Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 105 health premium reimbursement plan administration program for small employers, said he believes that the individual major medical market really has become heavily shaped by the PPACA subsidies.

2. Consumers may be shifting to firms that offer more access to live humans.

Lindquist said he himself has been buying individual health coverage through Web-based systems for years, but that he shifted to using a broker that offered easy access to call center representatives for 2015.

Lindquist’s firm has tried to help employers understand PPACA implementation, and he co-authored a book about health insurance market trends, “The End of Employer-Provided Health Insurance.”

PPACA drafters wanted the restrictions they put on medical underwriting, and the standards they set on major medical insurance, to make buying and selling health coverage easier.

But, this year, Lindquist found that, when he tried to get coverage, applying was difficult. “I had questions,” he said.

Even when a Web broker’s application systems work well, insurers might have questions for the applicants. A firm with live humans on hand can simplify the application experience by taking over the job of managing consumer-insurer communications, Lindquist said.

3. Pressure on employers to push more consumers into the individual health insurance market may be stronger than it looks.

Most of the big, publicly traded health insurers reported at least a small increase in overall enrollment between Dec. 31, 2013, and Dec. 31, 2014.

Any complaints by brokers or insurers about the PPACA exchange program may have more to do with specific companies’ strategies than with any big, obvious shifts in the well-being of the commercial health insurance market, Lindquist said.

Change “creates an opportunity to pivot,” he said. “Not everyone can win.”

But Lindquist said his firm has seen a steady increase in small employer interest in finding alternatives to traditional group coverage. That’s increasing individual market sales now and should increase individual sales more over time, he said.

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