HealthSherpa

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IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW

DISCLAIMER: HealthSherpa is one of the Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) ACA brokers which run banner ads on my site. EDEs are basically authorized private, 3rd-party versions of ACA exchange sites which have their back ends integrated directly into the federal exchange (HealthCare.Gov) (W3LL and Stride Health are the other EDEs which advertise here).

Having said that, I believe Sherpa is the largest ACA EDE out there, and they're pretty transparent about their enrollment metrics, so until CMS posts their latest official Weekly Snapshot Enrollment Report (which should happen soon), Sherpa's updates are pretty good indicators of how things are going overall.

It's important to remember to that Sherpa is currently only equipped to enroll people in the 33 federal exchange states (i.e., those utilizing HealthCare.Gov).

Health Sherpa Logo

DISCLAIMER: HealthSherpa is one of the Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) ACA brokers which run banner ads on my site. EDEs are basically authorized private, 3rd-party versions of ACA exchange sites which have their back ends integrated directly into the federal exchange (HealthCare.Gov) (W3LL and Stride Health are the other EDEs which advertises here).

Having said that, I believe Sherpa is the largest ACA EDE out there, and they're pretty transparent about their enrollment metrics, so until CMS posts their official Weekly Snapshot Enrollment Report (which should happen later this week), Sherpa's updates are pretty good indicators of how things are going overall.

In the first three weeks of 2022 Open Enrollment, they reported having enrolled 1,063,745 people in Qualified Health Plans (QHPs across the 33 states hosted via HealthCare.Gov.

Health Sherpa Logo

DISCLAIMER: HealthSherpa is one of two Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) ACA brokers which run banner ads on my site. EDEs are basically authorized private, 3rd-party versions of ACA exchange sites which have their back ends integrated directly into the federal exchange (HealthCare.Gov) (W3LL is the other EDE which advertises here).

Having said that, I believe Sherpa is the largest ACA EDE out there, and they're pretty transparent about their enrollment metrics, so until CMS posts their official Weekly Snapshot Enrollment Report (which should happen later this week), Sherpa's updates are pretty good indicators of how things are going overall.

The first week of 2022 Open Enrollment, they reported having enrolled 310,168 people in Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) across the 33 states hosted via HealthCare.Gov (they originally reported 329,935, but adjusted the report to account for the first week actually only being 6 days this year).

Health Sherpa Logo

DISCLAIMER: HealthSherpa is one of two Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) ACA brokers which run banner ads on my site. EDEs are basically authorized private, 3rd-party versions of ACA exchange sites which have their back ends integrated directly into the federal exchange (HealthCare.Gov) (W3LL is the other EDE which advertises here).

Having said that, I believe Sherpa is the largest ACA EDE out there, and they're pretty transparent about their enrollment metrics, so until CMS posts their official Weekly Snapshot Enrollment Report (which should happen later this week), Sherpa's updates are pretty good indicators of how things are going overall.

Here's what they said last week about the first week of ACA Open Enrollment in the states hosted by HealthCare.Gov:

Health Sherpa Logo

DISCLAIMER: HealthSherpa is one of two Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) ACA brokers which run banner ads on my site. EDEs are basically authorized private, 3rd-party versions of ACA exchange sites which have their back ends integrated directly into the federal exchange (HealthCare.Gov) (W3LL is the other EDE which advertises here).

Having said that, I believe Sherpa is the largest ACA EDE out there, and they're pretty transparent about their enrollment metrics, so until CMS posts their official Weekly Snapshot Enrollment Report (which should happen sometime today or tomorrow), Sherpa's updates are pretty good indicators of how things are going overall.

Here's what they said last year two weeks into Open Enrollment:

DISCLAIMER: HealthSherpa has a banner ad placement agreement with ACASignups.net.

As regular readers know, for the past two Open Enrollment Periods, I've had a banner ad agreement with HealthSherpa, a 3rd-party Web Broker which enrolls people in ACA exchange policies. It's important to understand that unlike some other web brokers which sell ACA policies alongside non-ACA compliant plans, I only entered into this agreement with HS because they only offer on-exchange ACA-compliant policies. And no, I'm not being paid extra for this blog post; I don't work that way.

Having said that, there's no denying that their press release today is intriguing and an important look at the public/private status of the ACA:

HealthSherpa enrolls over 1 million Americans during Open Enrollment Period

Disclosure: HealthSherpa has a banner ad on this site...for the following reasons:

  • Their website only sells ACA-compliant plans.
  • They display all of them equally (as opposed to hiding or favoring one over another).
  • They only sell them on-exchange (if you're eligible for ACA subsidies you get them through HS's site as well)
  • They make it easy to enroll fro Medicaid/CHIP if the enrollee isn't eligible for a subsidized ACA policy.

It's really, really important to me to make the above very clear, for the following reasons as laid out by Tara Straw of the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities:

Over at LinkedIn, George Kalogeropoulos has and Shandon Fowler have a fascinating piece about employer-based coverage and the relationship it has to public healthcare coverage:

Here is our call to action for employers: Guide employees of any eligibility status to health coverage, whether employer-sponsored or government-supported, because it will benefit both employees and your company.

The main thrust of the article is that while most employers offer some sort of healthcare coverage option to their employees (in fact, most did so before the ACA mandated it), most of them don't appear to make a whole lot of effort to actually get the employees to enroll in that coverage...and even fewer make any sort of effort to encourage their staff to enroll in other types of healthcare coverage outside of the employer plan.

They include several charts and graphs, but this is the key one to me:

Here's the Wikipedia entry for HealthSherpa:

HealthSherpa is a California-based technology company focused on connecting individuals with health coverage. The site was initially developed as an alternative to research plans from Healthcare.gov, and now provides individual health, dental and vision benefits to both part-time employees and retirees. As of February 2017, over 800,000 people have been enrolled in individual health coverage through HealthSherpa.

First, I want to clarify that I'm not shilling for HealthSherpa here. They aren't paying me for this post. I have no idea whether their customer service is awesome or sucks or anything like that.

Having said that, they are a pretty good resource for getting a feel for what the big picture situation is regarding open enrollment trends each year, and they have provided me with some internal data which they've OK'd me to share publicly.

It's important to note that all of the data here refers to exchange-based enrollments only. They reiterated to me that their individual market enrollments are on-exchange only:

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