Gary L. Lauer
Analyst · Dave Styblo from Jefferies
Well, we need the site -- first of all, the site's got to be up and running because that's the entry point. I mean, everybody needs to understand that for anyone who's subsidy eligible, that subsidy is confirmed essentially through the Treasury Department. And to get there, you've got to go through something called a Federal data hub. Even the state exchanges do this. For us, for carriers, for other brokers and so on, who are not healthcare.gov, we have to pass through healthcare.gov to get into this confirmation area for subsidy eligible individuals and work with healthcare.gov to do that. If the site's not operating, we can't do it. If the site's operating and stable, we can do it. That's really what it comes down to. I'm simplifying it, but that's really what it's about. If it's operating reliably, we, again, believe that we can generate some really interesting volume here with subsidized consumers. And on constraints, our biggest constraint, and I know I just keep repeating myself, but once again, is the constraint that we have and the risk factor that we have in this, and everyone has as well, is healthcare.gov and our ability to get in and through that efficiently and with a fair amount of scale because we believe we're going to see a lot of demand. We saw a lot of demand last year for subsidy eligible consumers. In fact, we've made the comment several times that had we had the capability last year, we had demand sufficient last year, last open enrollment period, to have at least as many subsidy eligible applications as we had non-subsidy eligible applications. We would expect to see a similar trend in this open enrollment period.