GoHealth Sees Consumers Increasingly Shopping Medicare Plans

GoHealth has seen consumers increasingly shop for Medicare plans, and it expects that trend to continue.

The health insurance marketplace and Medicare-focused digital health company’s peers and partners have seen this trend too, CEO Vijay Kotte said Thursday (Aug. 10) during the company’s second-quarter 2023 earnings call.

Beneficiaries now switch plans as many as five times a year, and GoHealth is helping these Medicare consumers assess their coverage and selected plans, Kotte added.

“If consumers are going to shop, we want them to shop with us, regardless of whether we originally enrolled them in the plan,” Kotte said during the call. “More consumers will shop with us if we build a trusted relationship by delivering an unbiased, high-quality consumer shopping experience. This approach leverages an agnostic consumer marketplace with multiple plan options and develops credibility with consumers.”

GoHealth saw this trend toward increased shopping during a quarter in which it achieved several milestones. The firm helped more than 162,000 Medicare customers review and enroll in a plan, reached $140 million in revenue, achieved nearly $1 million in adjusted EBITDA, and gained almost $11 million in positive cash flow.

The company has also raised its guidance for the remainder of the year. The expectation for total net revenue now sits between $800 million and $850 million, up from the previous lower estimate of $750 million. Its projected adjusted EBITDA range is now between $120 million and $140 million, up from the previous lower estimate of $100 million.

“We remain committed to enhancing the personalization of the consumer experience, which has been a driving force behind our transformation,” Kotte said during the call. “As we have stated in the past, we expect plan shopping to continue to increase and our long game is to invest in relationships and align incentives.”

GoHealth said in March that it was making changes to its business model by focusing on proprietary technology, an embrace of more frequent plan shopping and switching, and a new definition of lifetime value (LTV).

With plan shopping and switching happening at a faster pace, GoHealth is responding with a focus on more experienced, tenured agents fielding inquiries, as well as abandoning non-core areas like its platform support for third parties, the firm said at the time.