Exclusive: Interesting tidbit about those autorenewals...

I've received some interesting information regarding just how CMS/HHS plans on handling autorenewals (aka "passive re-enrollments") for those people who are currently enrolled in ACA exchange QHPs, but who took no action whatsoever as of midnight last night. It's important to note that this information only relates to those enrolled in 35 of the states run through HC.gov (that is, this doesn't relate to any of the state-run exchanges, and it doesn't even include Oregon or Nevada, since everyone currently enrolled in those states has to manually re-enroll).

So, we're talking about a maximum number of perhaps 5 million people here...and even then, a good half of them have likely manually re-enrolled, leaving perhaps another 2.5 million.

Having said all that, here's the info: In most cases, anyone who neither manually re-enrolled nor manually cancelled their policy should be automatically re-enrolled in their current policy (albeit possibly at a higher--or, in a few cases, lower--premium cost).

However, in some cases, that may not happen, for any of a variety of reasons. HHS has given 4 types of situation where the enrollee can still receive coverage starting January 1st even if they missed the 12/15 cut-off and they weren't auto-renewed:

• Passive Re-enrollment Technical Error (i.e. there was some sort of data/technical glitch)
• Qualified Individual's Plan Discontinued (i.e. the insurance company is no longer offering that policy or has dropped out of HC.gov completely)
• Passive Re-enrolled into the Wrong Plan (i.e. the enrollee was accidentally re-enrolled into a different policy when their existing one was still available)
• 2015 Crosswalk Plan Suppressed (i.e. the policy itself isn't currently available for 2015 due to some certification/filing problem between the insurance company and HHS)

More interesting still: According to CMS, some of these special cases may be dealt with retroactively:

"a Qualified Individual who was not passively re-enrolled due to a technical error and returns to the Marketplace on January 18, 2015 to select a new plan will have a system assigned effective date of March 1, 2015 transmitted on the 834 but may elect a coverage effective date of January 1, 2015 or February 1, 2015."

Officially, the deadline for this sort of situation is 60 days from the latter of two dates: January 1st, 2015, or five days after the date provided on the passive enrollment confirmation message.