Hartford, Connecticut. Credit: Mark Lotterhand/Adobe Stock
Connecticut's Affordable Care Act public exchange program is seeing enough broker and employer interest in the new cash-for-coverage plans to provide numbers.
Workers at employers with individual coverage health reimbursement arrangement plans can use contributions from the employers to buy their own individual or family major medical coverage.
Access Health CT was serving 33 employers with ICHRA plans at the start of the year, according to John Carbone, the director of the exchange team that works with small employers.
The ICHRA plans served 325 workers.
The ICHRA plan prospect pipeline looks strong: About 400 brokers have participated in Access Health CT ICHRA training programs, and roughly 650 employers have shown a serious interest offering an ICHRA plan, Carbone said.
Carbone gave the ICHRA numbers in an email.
Connecticut employers seem to like the idea that an ICHRA plan could provide "predictable budgeting, expanded employee choice and relief from the administrative burden of traditional group renewals," Carbone said.
The history: The Affordable Care Act is supposed to help small employers get affordable coverage from commercial health insurers through the Small Business Health Options Program.
SHOP plans are supposed to let workers choose from a menu of coverage options through a plan that looks in some ways like a traditional group health plan.
Connecticut, California and Colorado have been examples of states with active SHOP plan programs.
Many other states have had too little interest in the employer plan market or too little skill in employer plan marketing to generate much employer plan business, and federal regulators rarely posted any SHOP plan sales or in-force enrollment data.
But, at one point, board members of Nevada's state ACA public exchange program implied that Nevada's SHOP plans were covering fewer than 10 people.
Access Health CT: Access Health CT helps about 157,000 of the state's 3.6 million get coverage.
The exchange is not releasing the SHOP plan participant count, but Carbone estimated that about 500 of the state's employers are offering SHOP plans.
ICHRAs: Employers and brokers have been talking about ways to create practical cash-for-coverage employer plan programs for decades.
Officials developed the framework for the ICHRA program during President Donald Trump's first term in office.
The COVID-19 pandemic began as ICHRA program managers were starting to ramp up marketing, and the program managers slowed ICHRA marketing efforts.
Last year, the programs began to get a new chance to launch.
Analysts at HealthSherpa, a health insurance enrollment support firm, estimated in January that about 400,000 to 800,000 people might be using ICHRA plans to pay for their coverage.
Correction: An earlier version of this article gave an inaccurate Access Health CT user count. About 157 people have used the exchange to sign up for coverage for 2026.
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