2024 ACA Open Enrollment: Steady Plan Competition, Tailored Benefits

  • Nov 03, 2023

    Ahead of the 2024 open enrollment period for Affordable Care Act exchange plans that began on Nov. 1, major U.S. health insurers issued a spate of press releases touting their plan options and listing new areas in which they’d offer coverage. While ACA marketplace experts say that 2024 will not feature any seismic changes in terms of insurer competition — given the exchanges’ history of mass insurer exits and panic over “bare counties” with no available health plans, that may be a good thing. 

    “Overall participation by carriers is down from last year, when there was also a slight decline,” says Katherine Hempstead, Ph.D., who for years has helped produce the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) ACA Marketplace Participation Tracker. “So after several years of increased entry into new states, now we have seen a real leveling off,” adds Hempstead, who is RWJF’s senior policy adviser.  

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  • Leslie Small

    Leslie has been working in journalism since 2009 and reporting on the health care industry since 2014. She has covered the many ups and downs of the Affordable Care Act exchanges, the failed health insurer mega-mergers, and hundreds of other storylines spanning subjects such as Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage, employer-sponsored insurance, and prescription drug coverage. As the managing editor of Health Plan Weekly and Radar on Drug Benefits, she writes and edits for both publications while overseeing a small team of reporters who also focus on the managed care sector. Before joining AIS Health, she was a senior editor for the e-newsletter Fierce Health Payer, and she started her career as a copy editor at multiple local newspapers. She graduated with a dual degree in journalism and political science from Penn State University.

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