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

The 2023 enrollment season is approaching. Here are the critical dates you need to know plus tips and resources 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). 

Read on to learn the key dates you and your fellow insurance agents should know for the next enrollment season (plus, some top tips to ensure you stay efficient during the busiest time of the year).

Key Open Enrollment Period 2022–2023 Dates

Here are the important dates you should know for the approaching enrollment season, along with certain exceptions that your clients may qualify for.

2023 Individual Market/ACA Open Enrollment Period

For 2023, the Individual Market OEP (including ACA coverage) for healthcare insurance plans begins November 1st and ends December 15, 2022, for most states. There are a few states that don’t have to follow this schedule, some of which offer longer enrollment periods. 

While the OEP is set in stone, the Individual Market accounts for life’s events and has specific qualifying situations where you can get healthcare coverage outside of the OEP dates. These events include, but are not limited to: 

• Marriage or divorce
• Becoming a U.S. citizen
• Birth or adoption
• Involuntary loss of health coverage
• Permanently moving to an area where new health plans are available
• Plan renewal outside of the regular OEP

2023 Medicare Annual Election Period (for Medicare Advantage and Part D Plans)

The Medicare Annual Election Period (for coverage starting on January 1, 2023) begins on October 15th and ends on December 7, 2022. During this period, you can:

• Switch from Original Medicare to a Medicare Advantage plan, and vice versa
• Switch from a Medicare Advantage plan to another Medicare Advantage plan
• Switch from a Medicare Advantage plan that doesn’t include drug coverage to one that does, and vice versa
• Join a Medicare prescription drug plan
• Switch from one Medicare prescription drug plan to another 
• Drop your Medicare prescription drug coverage

For those that already have a Medicare Advantage plan, the OEP period is from January 1st to March 31, 2023. During this time, enrollees can switch to a different Medicare Advantage plan, opt for Original Medicare, and make changes to their drug coverage. 

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 To Keep in Mind for the Rest of 2022

The only time that a person may be eligible to get new coverage outside of the regular enrollment season is if they experience a life event. Examples of life events include:

• Losing or quitting a job
• Aging out of a parent’s plan — depending on the plan, the age-out date could vary
• COBRA insurance expiring
• 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 to the defined enrollment period include job-based health insurance enrollment periods. These may vary depending on the employer’s preference, however, 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

The AEP and OEP are always a hectic time for insurance agencies. You will want to find ways to save time, without sacrificing your ability to deliver high-quality customer service (and your sanity). 

Use an Industry-Specific Agency Management System

The right AMS can be a powerful, time-saving tool that increases productivity and organization during the hustle and bustle of Open Enrollment. AgencyBloc, for example, has features that you can use to manage and nurture customer relationships efficiently and effectively: 

• Custom Reporting. With a quick type-to-search or report, 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.

These reports can be based on carriers and coverage types to easily find anyone you might need to reach out to regarding changes for this upcoming year. 

• Automated Workflow. Our Automated Workflow processes can help you minimize the time you spend creating and assigning tasks, setting reminders, and more. In addition, this feature ensures peak efficiency by maintaining 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 very 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. 

Use our free Open Enrollment email templates to take your OEP marketing efforts to the next level.

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. Our robust software has a suite of CRM features designed specifically for 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 System 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! 

Use Resources To Help You Prepare for Open Enrollment 

In addition to the right AMS, you should also be referencing Open Enrollment resources throughout the year to help you and your team prepare for the busy season.

We pulled together some resources linked below to help you learn how to save time with prospect and client communications, streamline commissions processing, and more.

This blog was originally published on 7/23/2019, updated on 9/2/2020, and again on 8/9/2022.