ACA Open Enrollment 2025: ‘Calm Before the Storm’ of Subsidy Cliff

  • Nov 01, 2024

    As the 12th open enrollment period (OEP) for the Affordable Care Act exchanges kicked off Nov. 1, some noteworthy market trends include health insurers expanding into “farm belt” states, lower median deductibles, and a smaller number of plans available due to new regulatory limits on how many plans carriers can offer. And although industry experts say the 2025 plan year is slated to be largely uneventful for the exchanges, they caution that the stability is likely to be short-lived. 

    “This is the calm before the storm,” says Fritz Busch, a principal and consulting actuary at Milliman, referring to the fact that enhanced premium subsidies that have been in place since 2021 are set to expire after 2025. If Congress moves quickly early next year to extend the enhanced subsidies, “maybe there’s not a storm,” he tells AIS Health, a division of MMIT. Still, Busch says his clients have been talking for months about how to plan for various scenarios. 

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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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