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Life Health > Health Insurance > Your Practice

GetInsured Courts Agents With ACAExpress Deal

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One of the big web-based supermarkets for health insurance has made a deal to expand its agent support services program.

GetInsured acquired ACAExpress.com Inc. Aug. 31 for a price that was not disclosed.

GetInsured is a Mountain View, California-based web broker that has backing from Bessemer Venture Partners and other venture capital firms. It was founded in 2005. It is best known for helping consumers enroll directly in individual major medical insurance through the web.

ACAExpress is an Irving, Texas-based benefits enrollment support services firm that was founded in 2014. The company raised $1 million in seed funding in July 2015 from a source that has not been named, according to Crunchbase. ACAExpress has focused on helping agents and brokers enroll people in Affordable Care Act public health insurance exchange plans.

(Related: Getinsured.com Signs Exchange Hub Agreement

GetInsured also acquired Benefit Geek, an arm of ACAExpress that helps agents sell Medicare plans, life insurance and supplemental health insurance products.

ACAExpress has relationships with about 8,000 producers, and it has helped about 500,000 people sign up for health coverage, according to GetInsured.

Both GetInsured and ACAExpress have been certified “web broker entities,” or organizations with official permission to connect their systems to the federal government’s ACA exchange enrollment system.

Continuing uncertainty about how federal health insurance rules and programs will work in 2018 has hit the individual major medical market hard.

In the deal announcement, GetInsured said it will use the ACAExpress Benefit Geek brand to create a comprehensive quoting and enrollment services system for agents.

The system will help agents sell Medicare Advantage plans, Medicare supplement insurance plans, individual health insurance policies, life insurance policies and other products, GetInsured said.

Chini Krishnan, GetInsured’s chief executive officer, said in a statement that ACAExpress has “astounding traction in the marketplace.”

“Its ability to scale to support seasonal annual enrollment periods is impressive,” Krishnan said.

ACAExpress is keeping its offices in Texas, and the company’s three founders — Kenny West, Chris Linville and Don Archer — are now working for GetInsured.

West, the president of ACAExpress, is now the vice president for broker engagement at GetInsured.

Linville, the chief marketing officer at ACAExpress, has become the general manager for GetInsured’s broker business.

Archer, who has been the chief technology officer, is now the GetInsured engineering director.

ACAExpress has indicated that it does plan to support agents who sell individual major medical plans during the upcoming open enrollment period for 2018, which is set to start Nov. 1. The company says it will charge $3 per enrollment for agents who do not want to pay monthly fees. The company will also offer a custom pricing option for firms that expect to submit a large number of public exchange coverage applications.

— Read HealthCare.gov Web Broker List Shrinks Again on ThinkAdvisor.


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