Enhanced direct enrollment (EDE) is a new pathway for consumers to enroll in health insurance coverage through the Federally-facilitated Exchange. This pathway allows CMS to partner with the private sector to provide a more user-friendly and seamless enrollment experience for consumers by allowing them to apply for and enroll in an Exchange plan directly through an approved issuer or web-broker without the need to be redirected to HealthCare.gov or contact the Exchange Call Center.
Enhanced direct enrollment (EDE) is a new pathway for consumers to enroll in health insurance coverage through the Federally-facilitated Exchange. This pathway allows CMS to partner with the private sector to provide a more user-friendly and seamless enrollment experience for consumers by allowing them to apply for and enroll in an Exchange plan directly through an approved issuer or web-broker without the need to be redirected to HealthCare.gov or contact the Exchange Call Center.
In short, EDEs are basically a private version of HealthCare.Gov which are authorized by the federal government to hook directly into the HC.gov back end. This means that people who enroll via an EDE website are enrolling in on-exchange ACA coverage (including ACA financial subsidies as appropriate); they're just doing so via a 3rd party web interface. There's actually several dozen different EDEs, several of which have advertised on this site.
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Back in January, before the ongoing COVID Enrollment Period was officially announced, I ran some back-of-the-envelope math to try and project just how many additional ACA exchange enrollees might sign up nationally due to the addition of a "no questions asked" Special Enrollment Period (SEP) being formally launched across every state, as opposed to the patchwork of COVID SEPs we saw across a dozen states last spring/summer.
I extrapolated those numbers out nationally and estimated that total on-exchange enrollment might increase by perhaps 400,000 more people thanks to a 60-day COVID SEP...that is, 400K more than the "normal" number who typically enroll during that same time period for traditional SEP reasons (losing employer coverage, turning 26, getting married/divorced, moving, giving birth/adopting, etc).
