Dates To Know for This Year's Open Enrollment Season (+ Resources)

The Dates Insurance Agents Should Know For Open Enrollment 2024—Plus Tips To Tackle It With Ease.

The annual enrollment season is the timeframe when your clients may enroll in or make changes to their insurance plans for the next year, like health insurance. These enrollment periods are set up for Medicare, job-based or employer-provided health insurance, and individual market insurance, like the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 

Here are the key dates insurance agents should know for the 2024 enrollment season (plus, some resources to help you stay effective and efficient during the busiest time of the year).

Key Open Enrollment Period 2023–2024 Dates

Let’s explore the important dates to know for the approaching enrollment season and certain exceptions to keep in mind that your clients may qualify for.

2024 Individual Market/ACA Open Enrollment Period

For 2024, the Individual Market OEP (including ACA coverage) for healthcare insurance plans begins November 1st and ends January 15, 2024, for most states. There are a few states that follow a different enrollment schedule, some of which offer longer enrollment periods.

2024 Medicare Annual Election Period (for Medicare Advantage and Part D Plans)

The Medicare Annual Election Period (for coverage starting on January 1, 2024) begins on October 15th and ends on December 7, 2023. During this period, your clients can:

• Switch from Original Medicare to a Medicare Advantage plan, and vice versa
• Switch from one Medicare Advantage plan to another Medicare Advantage plan
• Opt-into or unenroll from a Medicare prescription drug coverage
• Switch from one Medicare prescription drug plan to another 

For those that already have a Medicare Advantage plan, OEP runs from January 1st to March 31, 2024. During this time, enrollees can switch to a different Medicare Advantage plan, opt for Original Medicare, and make changes to their drug coverage. These changes will go into effect on the first day of the following month.

People aging into Medicare are eligible to join, even if their birthday doesn’t align with AEP–you can easily track your aging-in clients with an industry-specific agency management system (AMS), which we’ll discuss later on.

Exceptions Outside of the 2024 Open Enrollment Period

While the OEP dates are set in stone, there are certain life events and qualifying situations where your clients can get coverage outside of the OEP in the Individual Market.

• Losing or quitting a job
• Aging out of a parent’s plan — depending on the plan, the age-out date could vary
• COBRA
• Expiring insurance
• Getting divorced
• Moving out of a plan’s service area
• Getting married
• Having a baby or adopting a child

In addition to life events, other exceptions include job-based health insurance enrollment periods. These may vary depending on the employer’s preference, however, most companies typically set their dates sometime in the fall so that their policies begin on January 1st.

How To Optimize Productivity During the Enrollment Period

AEP and OEP are always hectic for insurance agencies. Here are some ways you can save time, without sacrificing the ability to deliver high-quality customer service—and your sanity. 

Use an Industry-Specific Agency Management Platform

The right agency management system (AMS) can be a powerful, time-saving tool that increases your productivity and organization during the hustle and bustle of Open Enrollment. AgencyBloc, is an insurance agency management platform with solutions that you can use to manage and nurture customer relationships efficiently and effectively: 

• Quoting and Proposals. Reduce time spent on servicing small group clients by up to 50% every renewal season with Quote+, an AgencyBloc solution. This insurance quoting software gives you access to a private, broker-controlled online marketplace where you can gather and compare quotes from various carriers for medically underwritten, community rated, and ancillary products. 
  
  In addition to an intuitive online experience, Quote+ helps you turn small group benefits quotes into client-ready proposals, allows you to seamlessly gather medical health questionnaires, and enables you to easily report on employer and employee data. 
   
• Data Analysis & Custom Reporting. With quick type-to-search or industry-specific reports, you can find any information you’re looking for in seconds–you can even save these reports to use throughout the entire enrollment season to avoid wasting valuable time.
   
• Automated Workflow. Use insurance automation tools, such as our Automated Workflow, to minimize the time you spend creating and assigning tasks, setting reminders, and more. In addition, maintain peak efficiency by utilizing the same process for every policy renewal and new incoming lead.
   
• Email Campaigns. Staying on top of client communications–and ahead of critical deadlines–can be stressful and time-consuming. Automated email campaigns enable you to write and schedule email sends ahead of time so that you can focus on servicing your clients better than ever as real-time needs come up.
  
  Use our free Open Enrollment email templates to take your OEP marketing efforts to the next level.
   
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. Our robust insurance CRM software, which can double as insurance policy management software, has a suite of features designed specifically for health and life insurance agencies, making it easier than ever to manage your book of business. 
  
  You can house all of your important client data and communications in one place to keep all of your individuals, groups, and policies organized and updated. Attach important documents (like call recordings) to clients and their policies to avoid data silos and spending unnecessary amounts of time searching for information. 

AgencyBloc is the #1 Recommended Management Platform for life and health insurance agencies, and these are just a few of our many vast features designed to help your agency thrive. If you want to explore how we can help you tackle AEP/OEP, watch this five-minute overview video or schedule a live, one-on-one demo!

This blog was originally published on August 8, 2022, and has been most recently updated and republished on August 8, 2023.

Posted by Kelsey Rosauer on Tuesday, August 8, 2023 in Sales Enablement

1. open enrollment