Monday, February 08, 2016

Assumption status: #Fail

What with carriers cutting (and threatening to cut) agent commissions on individual health policies, I thought it'd be interesting to see if there was any change in the number of us who made the effort over the past few years  to become Marketplace certified. I assumed (yeah, I know) that the number would trend down, but had difficulty tracking accurate info on that.

Thanks to co-blogger Patrick P, however, we now have that data, and it's pretty interesting, if surprising (at least to me):


2014: 71,322
2015: 77,478
2016: 80,684


Now, that includes both individual and SHOP registration, but as I pointed out to Patrick, I think it's unlikely that there would be many agents who would go through the rigorous individual certification process and then skip the very simple SHOP registration one.

So we see that from the first year to the second, there was an increase of about  8.5% in the number of agents pulling the FFM trigger. Then from last year to this, the total again grew, but by a much smaller margin (a little over 4%, or about half of the previous season's).

If that trend holds, than next year one would expect to see about 1,600 new agents sign on.

But I don't think they will; in fact, I suspect that there will be a significant drop in the number of agents who bother to go through the training just so they can "sell" a product that doesn't pay a commission.

Time will, of course, tell.
blog comments powered by Disqus