New ACA Consent Rules - Clients being taken

[Yagents]

Bingo that's what he did . I was confused how he wrote the exact same plan and the premium was much lower .

So if he wrote the exact same plan, I thought Ambetter has "agent lock" and it should have remained in your B.O.B.

That's not good if so, maybe change to "maybe we'll lock in AOR"

 

[Agency Op Guru]

Here is the real root cause of all this. In the last 2-4 years marketing, specially social media marketing, by lead vendors incited customers to contact call centers looking for rewards, in the form of cash to help them pay for utilities, groceries or other expenses, instead of health insurance. These adds while not fraudulent, since carrier offer rewards programs via their healthy living programs that award point that convert to cash, only target people looking for cash and not for insurance. The lead vendors also may be recycling these leads and reselling from agency to agency or the customer in their pursuit to look for cash (bad economy on the gray segment, not medicaid, not over 200% FPL) are jumping from agency to agency not admitting they already enrolled with someone else (we call them jumpers). So as you can understand, call centers, agents/brokers that buy these leads are in a way victims as are the independent agents from this situation. It is also detrimental for carrier as they enroll and cancel policies constantly, mail ins cards, activate plans to cancel in less than one month. Also, CMS is affected by the overwhelming amount of app number created over and over. I have seen a single customer with up to 14 app numbers for the same enrollment period. It has become a vicious cycle since carriers offer these programs, customers respond to social media adds, agencies pay for leads they use and to that lets add the broad rule (until June 2023) that CMS had about "Customer Consent". Since, both CMS and carriers are implementing new procedures. CMS enhanced and is more closely monitoring the poaching by dictating more specific consent rules and carriers are securing AOR during OEP so that the policy remains with the original agent and they get the Commision (unless moved to another carrier, then the loss is the same to the selling agent). Colleagues, this crisis will take time to resolve and those who will not play by the real intent of our profession which is to ensured customers rather than to make quick money, will exit as fast as they came