Official Deems Debut of Nevada’s State-Based Exchange a Success

by Leslie Small

Nevada — the proverbial guinea pig among a host of states aiming to shift from the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchange platform to their own state-run exchange — now has completed its first full open enrollment period independent from HealthCare.gov.

Heather Korbulic, the executive director of the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, told AIS Health before open enrollment kicked off that to her, a successful transition would look like "we landed the plane — we got all of our consumers successfully migrated, we were able to work with enrollment professionals and the technology worked, and we could at least retain the enrollment that we had from previous years."

In January, AIS Health caught up with Korbulic to ask how the new state-based exchange fared during open enrollment that ran from Nov. 1 to Dec. 15, based on the parameters she outlined. So what's the verdict? "Using those metrics…I would say that we could call this a success," she says.

For one thing, her agency was able to migrate consumers' data, as well as the data regarding their relationships with insurance brokers and agents, from HealthCare.gov to the new state platform — a task Korbulic previously described as "very complicated."

During open enrollment, Nevada's health plan selections totaled 77,410, according to Korbulic. That's higher than the 65,563 active plan enrollments that the state migrated from HealthCare.gov in late October, but lower than the 83,449 plan selections during the open enrollment period for 2019 coverage (an unsurprising disparity as some who initially enroll in plans inevitably will drop coverage or never effectuate it).

Korbulic cautions against comparing the open enrollment signup totals for 2019 and 2020, as "we've never really had the actual insight in our data that would allow us to confirm or to feel…comfortable with the numbers that CMS puts out." Instead, "I think this 77,000 number is truly reflective of where Nevada is with our new baseline, and it's what to measure us from, from here on out," she says.

From Health Plan Weekly