Dave Mossberg with Three Part. Appreciate you all coming out for our conference. This is the 16th time we've done it in Dallas, so. And, I think, Vijay, this is your second time doing it with us, right? Or is it?
Yeah, yeah. And I think you've done Chicago before, so. Excited to hear about GoHealth or get an update for those of you new to the story, or whether you're new or whether you're getting an update. And I'll turn it over to Vijay.
All right. Well, thank you, Dave, and thank you for all joining us today to learn more about GoHealth. A lot of exciting things going on. I'm Vijay Kotte. I'm the CEO here. With me is Brendan Shanahan, our CFO, and our head of IR, John Shave, here in the front row. I really want to take some time today to talk about, before I get into the overall presentation on GoHealth, I'll remind you of the forward-looking disclaimers. You'll make yourself acquainted with them as appropriate, around forward-looking statements. Before we get too far into who GoHealth is, let me first talk about the problem we solve. For any of you who watch TV or the news in the last four weeks, you know what I'm talking about. You've seen a commercial about Medicare. You've heard probably about the Annual Enrollment Period.
This is the time of year, as you might expect, where 65 million Medicare consumers have the option to change their Medicare coverage going into January. This is an election period that happens every year. 65 million consumers. Half of those consumers already have chosen a Medicare Advantage plan to cover their Medicare benefits: typical hospital, professional, and they typically chose that plan because it had additional benefits. It might have had security of knowledge of what their co-pays, co-insurance may be. Or it could have been that they got supplemental benefits like dental, vision, and hearing, things that wouldn't have been covered under a traditional Medicare plan or original Medicare or covered by their Medicare supplements. There's likely zero premium on a Medicare Advantage plan. All good reasons why they enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan.
And as we get into the presentation, I'll just highlight the uniqueness of this Annual Enrollment Period . It's unique because this is the first Annual Enrollment Period in nearly the history of Medicare Advantage when you've had as much negative disruption as we've seen this shopping season. And that is because a number of health plans, the big names that you would expect, the Aetnas, the Humanas of the world, have all had a lot of pressure on their margin in the Medicare Advantage business. And so what that resulted in is plan exits that consumers were notified of late this year, and plan degradation, meaning your co-pays went up or certain benefits went away if you were to stay in the same plan. What does that mean for a company like GoHealth? You have more shoppers who need to shop and make a change than ever before.
It's not an option. A lot of consumers used to set it and forget it. This year, you don't have the option. The plan is gone. You're going to have to find another option. Or if you set it and forget it, your costs are going to go up a lot. So you need to shop and make sure that the plan you're on is still the best one for you. So that's the problem we're trying to solve is that when a lot of shoppers are out there, when they have to try to find a source of information to help them figure out what is the best health plan coverage option for them, who can they trust, and who can really help, identify the most suitable plan to meet your personalized needs, and that's where GoHealth comes in.
And as we talk about this, and again, you can see on the screen, we've served over 10 million consumers, unique consumers and shopping experiences over the last, call it, four to five years. The company's been around for 20, but we've been the leader and focused exclusively in Medicare over the last five or six years. And, when I say we're the leader in that space, we're the largest source of Medicare Advantage enrollment for every major health plan in the country. So I'll show you a chart in a moment that shows United, Humana, Aetna, Cigna, Elevance/Anthem, WellCare. We're the number one source of enrollment for Medicare Advantage lives for all of them.
And we've done this because we have a unique operating model that enables efficiency, and we can talk about how our differentiated technology gives us the "scale leverage" that allows you to, you know, be efficient with our dollar spend. And that has been a significant component of what has been going on with the company over the last few years, and I'll talk to you about the history. As I said, we're a 20-year-old company. But over the history of the company, we served different populations. It was originally set up to serve individuals seeking insurance, because it was very complicated back in the early 2000s to figure out as an individual who wasn't getting employer benefits to find insurance. So that's how the founder started the company: an online marketplace for people to search for individual insurance.
As time went on, they leaned into the ACA exchanges, and then back in, you know, 2015, 2016, that market got disrupted. And so they had to innovate and moved explicitly into Medicare. The company went public in 2020, right at the beginning of COVID, actually, and over that time frame, the company continued to grow. But there was always a cash dynamic with the business. I ultimately came into the business as CEO in June of 2022, as a transformation of the company to really drive us being an operating organization, to make more efficient operating cash decisions and balancing more of the dynamics within the Medicare business. It was a good fit for me because I'd spent over 20+ years of my career working in Medicare. I've built and run insurance companies. I've run medical groups in the space, technology companies in the space.
It's all I know. And it was really exciting to me to come into an organization who was serving this many consumers every year in a very important decision that they made. As we've seen over the course of these years, the market penetration of Medicare Advantage as an alternate, coverage option to consumers has been growing. You can see we're currently 54% of the market is choosing a Medicare Advantage plan. And the way to think about that progression is the way many of us thought about the shift from typical indemnity insurance and commercial towards HMOs and PPOs, right? Those products came in. It took time for adoption. But then most of the market realized there's a cost efficiency that comes from that transition of the trade-offs that come with it. And the Medicare population has made a similar transition.
Now, over half of consumers choose that alternative to Medicare Original. And on the right-hand side of the slide, what you're seeing is this is our position with each one of the major carriers. And you can see we are number one for each one of them individually and collectively the number one source of all Medicare Advantage and new enrollments per year, across the country. One of you, some of you may ask the question: if you've got brands like United, Humana, Aetna, why do they even need somebody like us? Why can't consumers just go direct to health plans? Well, there are three typical ways a consumer can enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan. On the left-hand side, you'll see this is the Health Plan Direct. If you know you love, Aetna or United, you can go direct to them, call them. You can go to their website.
And what will you get? Here are the three criteria I'll differentiate on. Choice. You're going to get low choice because odds are if you call an Aetna direct phone line, all they're going to offer you are Aetna plans. They're going to not use sophisticated matching technology because they don't need to. They just have a few plans they're trying to convince you are going to be right for you within their geography. And the bottom one is going to be more salient as we move forward. But ultimately, we call this is the unbiased check. So let's say if you came to that Aetna agent and you had a United product that was better, actually, objectively better, that Aetna agent has no incentive to tell you to stay on the product you're on. Their incentive is to convince you that one of theirs would be better, right?
So it's not an unbiased advocate on your behalf. But there are plenty of consumers who can go through that channel. Now, there are a number of consumers who actually want to have a shopping experience across carriers. So they might go to the local trusted broker in town, Jimmy, right? So Jimmy, everybody knows Jimmy. You go to Jimmy when you want to figure out your insurance. What they think is when they talk to Jimmy, Jimmy's going to give you the best product available for you in your county, right, where you live. In reality, Jimmy can't make all those products available because it's administratively burdensome. There are too many products. You have to go through training with each one of those health plans. You need to learn a lot about those products to offer them.
So generally speaking, local brokers, the traditional broker model will pick a handful of plans to offer. And sometimes it's influenced based upon which one they're more familiar with. And unfortunately, sometimes it's influenced by who pays them more. And then when you sit down with them of those options, Jimmy's going to give you a product offering. Now, the third component, again, is a challenge because if Jimmy didn't put you on your current policy, he's likely going to be incentivized only to put you on a new policy. So he's not going to tell you to do nothing. He's probably going to tell you to do something and find the one benefit that's better on this new plan, maybe de-emphasize what isn't better with that new product. So again, misaligned incentives. Now, I made the chart. So on my side, it's all green, right?
But at the top is consumer choice first. Because of our scale, because of our technology, we are able to present more plan offerings than a traditional broker model. We have thousands of agents who are trained and appointed with these different health plans. So we have a vast selection within the marketplace. The only way you can effectively do that is to have technology that can decipher and normalize the data so that you can compare them. But what really makes us different in our technology is we can automate the filtering logic to pull in your doctors, your prescription drugs to make sure we're only giving you product offerings that meet your critical needs. Your doctors, number one reason why somebody disenrolls with a plan quickly is they find out their doctor actually isn't in network.
The second most common reason is the drugs I need aren't on formulary at the tier that I can afford, so we start with that logic upfront, and our technology then makes sure that the plans that are presented are only ones that would be meeting your critical needs, then we do a personalized needs assessment, and that data feeds into the logic, and this is the only time I'll use the term AI, though I've been told everybody has to say AI these days, but our AI logic has 30 million shopping experiences underlying it. We can understand what the satisfaction level was for each one of those shopping experiences and products they stuck on, and then we can say that this consumer looks most like this new consumer, you look most like these other consumers. Therefore, we'd give a proprietary ranking of the products available in the market.
So that's how technology gives you a personalized match, forced ranking, one through whatever of what you're eligible for. Now, the third criteria, the unbiased check. Now, what we do is we also pull in your current plan. We do a line-by-line comparison. We pull to the top. We distill the top five to 10 key differentiators between the plan you're on versus the top plan. Easy scenario is if your plan you're on is actually under our logic, the number one plan, regardless if we put it on, put you on it in the first place, we tell you to do nothing. And you know what we do that's unique to anybody in the industry? We pay our agents to not enroll you in a plan.
We pay our agents to give you the right outcome of an efficient, qualitative shopping experience that may result in no new enrollment, no new revenue. What do we provide? We actually offer peace of mind to consumers, so that is a PlanFit, unbiased checkup. Now, let's say the plan you're on isn't number one. It's number four or number ten. We will then provide you the key, like I said, distilled down five to ten key reasons why we believe this other product is better for you or more suitable for you, and now you're empowered to make a decision. You can say, "I'm okay with keeping my own product. I'll stay there." Fine. My agent still got paid. You can say you want to switch. My agent still gets paid. They facilitate that and make sure they can answer your questions about the new product.
That is how we enable a consistent, repeatable process. This flow allows us to automate. We make sure that we take the art out of this process. When you do that, you can get scale leverage of bringing in more agents, being more efficient, serving more consumers. But we start with what is the happy flow through the process, force the technology to enable that, and then reinforce it with incentives. Because the one thing I've learned, and I'm sure many of you know as well, is that if you compensate people to do something, don't be surprised if they do something else, right? They're going to be doing exactly what you pay them for. And if you don't pay them for doing it, they're not going to do it out of the goodness of their heart at scale. Once in a while, they will, but it's not predictable.
You must compensate the behavior you're looking for, and we double it down, double down on it with our technology. This is a repeatable process or flow that has enabled us. We deployed this at scale between 2022 and 2023. In 2021, we burned over $300 million in cash, negative $300 plus million in cash in 2021 fiscal year. In 2023, fully reported, we generated a positive $109 million in cash. Over that time frame, we paid down over $200 million in debt, and we most recently just refinanced $500 million worth of debt, after proving that we actually have an efficient model to do that. These are all major drivers in enabling that cash efficiency, was getting a more effective operating model. Stop burning cash, stop burning leads, stop ramping up agents without giving them tools, stop assuming people will get better.
That has been effective in how we thought about it. And when we deliver a consistent experience for a consumer, I'm still a capitalist at heart. So why do I do that? Why am I doing the right thing in this very specific instance of telling you not to change plans? It's because I believe there is value of a return on that investment over the long run. And we're playing the long game. And you can see here with Anne. Anne is going to have 20 shopping experiences over her Medicare eligibility span. And why want her to shop with us every single time? And all the green dots on the page are when she was already on the right plan. No plan change necessary. In the blue dots, where those little leaves are, that's where the changes happen. And they were for normal reasons.
Do you think Medicare consumers move home sometimes? Did you know that a Medicare Advantage plan stays within a county? And if you move across a county line, you have to change plans. So there might be a time when Anne changes plans. She moves. Another time could be that Anne is diagnosed with a new chronic condition. She has new doctors that maybe aren't in network in the product she's in. Or there's additional benefits for those with that condition in a different plan. Well, she comes in and shops again. We match her with that, and we put her in it. Her financial situation changes. She needs to care more about certain copays versus others. She'd rather have lower copays than a higher deductible. All these things can be factored in, but those are all natural inflection points.
And so the goal shouldn't be to just keep somebody locked into a policy. The goal should be to get you into the right plan that meets your now current needs. Oh, and by the way, health plans change their benefits every year. Even if you were happy last year, you may not be this year. That's why I highlighted at the beginning. Health plans can change the benefit structure. They can take providers out to gain cost efficiency. They can move drugs around to get cost efficiencies and expand their margins. And if you're not staying on top of it every year to check in, you may get unpleasantly surprised when you access care in January.
And so that's why we play the long game with our plan-fit checkup process to make sure we deliver a high-quality experience, pay our agents to do that, whether or not today it pays back. But I assure you, the math proves that over time in the longitudinal relationship, it will more than pay back. And that's what we're playing, is that the long game relationship is more valuable than the short-term transaction. I'll skip over this. This is more of the dynamics of how often those plan-fit checkups turn into a sale versus somebody just decides they don't want to do anything, even though their plan may not be the top ranked, and then, which ones will actually just be reconfirmed that they are on the right plan. As you think about how we differentiate ourselves within the marketplace, there are a number of ways you can show that.
You can do it on total volume. I think I've already showed that to you, that we're the largest by volume for every major health plan in an aggregate across the country. Another way you can do it is the efficiency of your model, right? So you can, you can buy volume. You can spend ridiculous amounts of money to acquire a new customer and show a lot of top line and show a lot of submissions. In our business, you want to look at cost per acquisition or direct cost per, per sale. And in our world, we, against our two public peers in the 2023 reported period, you can see we are head and shoulders above our peers.
If you look at the year prior in 2022, we were still leading the peer group, but going into 2023, we had a sequential 9% improvement in that cost per acquisition. And this year, we're already on track to beating that number, even further. And that is a really important metric because one of the most important things in our business I highlighted was cash, cash burn, and how you can use cash to effectively and efficiently grow. And when you again simple math, I know you all get it. If you spend less to get each sale, you're going to be more efficient with that dollar because it takes fewer dollars to generate the next dollar. In addition, the key driver of this efficiency is by getting what I think is one of the most key performance indicators of our business, KPIs, average handle time of our selling agents.
When I decrease the average handle time they need to spend because of technology and integrations and simplicity for the agent to facilitate a phone call, they have capacity to take one more phone call. That capacity is generally at the same level, the same fixed costs. So I gain scale leverage every time I can take a couple minutes out of that call conversation time. In 2022, we were north of almost 150 minutes, two and a half hours on the phone to get from presentation, introduction to a consumer to a sale. In 2023, we're about 120 minutes. This year, we're below 60 minutes.
What you can see how that comes through is in our Q3 numbers for our internal captive agents, those who use our marketplace, our employees, production year over year, Q3 of 2023 versus Q3 of 2024 versus Q3 of 2023. We generated 46% more submissions with our internal agents due to the tools. We didn't grow our agent pool by that much. We did it by efficiency, by taking 120 minutes down to below 60 minutes. That's how you grew that submission volume and then drove down the CAC even further this year. These are the keys of what we think are highlights of what differentiates us and enables us to be a winner, a leader, and a continued winner as we move forward into a market where people are continuing to look for cost savings opportunities for their daily needs.
The technology and AI automation, I said it today once, I'm going to give you the reminder of the chart, but I'm not going to change the reference that I made earlier. These tools are the differentiators. This is the moat. You can want to do all these things, but you need to be willing to bet on doing the right thing first. So we built our entire workflow, our technology, our quality assurance processes and checks to ensure that we start by doing good for the consumer, provide peace of mind, and then it's leadership's job to find a way to make money doing that, not the reverse. What we don't believe in is make money and try to find a way to make it look good. We are really committed to that.
When we do that at scale and simplify it for the agents, you know, another key driver of cost and cash efficiency is retention versus attrition. Our agents love working with us because they feel good about what they do. They're not being pushed to convert people to a product that they don't believe in or they don't know is good for them. And they can get compensated for it. Nobody's pushing for them, but they're almost; it's like we're pushing our agents to do the right thing so they can feel good about their jobs. And the top performers love doing that. So we are committed to enabling more and more technology to simplify their lives. You know, one of the key plans, tools that we have is what we call PlanGPT. It's a very simple tool, but let me explain to you the dynamic.
So when a consumer is talking to an agent on the phone, they will ask a question, "Do you have a grocery benefit?" And then most agents around the country, what they'll do is go find what's an Evidence of Coverage. That's a contract between the health plan and the member. And they'll do a word search on that document for grocery. And if they do that on a United product, they would come up with no coverage. There's no benefit covered in that category. Our tool, when they put simple language into the tool by the agent, they search for grocery. They say, "There's no grocery, but there's a 99% match that healthy living benefit that covers food is the grocery benefit," which it is.
So our logic and that AI brain behind it interprets and can find the answers in a thousand-page document that can answer your question right now. And that may seem like a simple efficiency. No, it's more than that. The number one driver of trust for the consumer with our agent is, "Do you know the answers to my questions, or do I feel like you're making it up? Do I trust that you know what you're talking about?" Because I don't know who else to trust. And when an agent can answer with conviction the accuracy of that answer fast, that builds trust, that drives down the handle time and drives the higher probability that you're going to get the desired outcome, which is a happy consumer in the right plan that you help support the enrollment of.
So as you think about GoHealth and the future, and as you think about, you know, talking to your investment committees or your peers as to why GoHealth may be interesting, this is my CliffsNotes version of the page as to what you want to think about. First, it's a large and growing market, right? 5%-7% CAGR year over year on the Medicare population in total, 65 million consumers, only 54 of, sorry, 54% of which who are in Medicare Advantage plans today, and that's growing. Nearly 80% of new to Medicare, those who are newly eligible to Medicare are choosing Medicare Advantage plans today. So it's going, it's more and more shoppers in the space. We're the only ones who don't just say unbiased, but compensate for unbiased behavior. And that's why these aren't just words. We actually deliver it. Our Encompass offering is the workflow.
A standardized, efficient workflow can get consumers the answers they need. And this is not something we bought off the open market. We built this. We built for purpose, understanding what the best practices of our best agents were. And again, it's so simple to say it, but to do it is hard to take their art and turn 80% of it into science. And that's what we've done with our technology and Encompass workflow. Our proprietary tech is obviously the basis upon that. Our data platform, we have a CRM we built called Customer 360 so that every time a consumer comes back, on any given year, 30% of our consumers call us back, right, to just check in. We don't even have to outreach to them. And they can start, they don't start from zero. It's an ad change delete. We start with their profile.
We know them, they know us. And that's what that CRM platform allows us to have very customized outreach, marketing engagement, as well as, shopping experiences for them. Our experience management team, both myself and Brendan have spent over 20 years in the Medicare space understanding and serving this consumer, and we're committed to it. There are easier ways to make money in this world. So you have to have a commitment to wanting to do this and do the hard work. And we are. Our ability to market, we use internal and external channels to be able to optimize our demand, supply-demand matching for our agents' capacity, the marketing tools and leads that we have against desired wait times. You don't want too high of a wait time, and you don't want too low of a wait time.
And we have a real-time, ability to be able to toggle between those based upon our unique internal marketing engines, alongside our external marketing partnerships. Our health plan partners are vested strategic partners with us, given our significance and the mix and quality of the population we bring. And then finally, we have a focus on the balance sheet. We understand that every incremental dollar we generate needs to be thought about as to how we will deploy it. Should we retain it on the balance sheet and pay down debt, or is it a better return for investors to deploy it to grow the business? And there's a high hurdle rate on that right now because my cost of capital is not cheap.
But having been able to go through a refi that gives me a five-year runway on being able to focus on the business and invest to be able to optimize this for shareholders, and for the lender partners that we have is, is a luxury that we have that is unique within the industry. So we're very excited about what we can do, and we appreciate your interest and are open to any questions that you may have. Yes, sir. Sure. The question was, why wouldn't somebody just go to Medicare.gov to do all of this? Because they, they can go to Medicare.gov to see the plan options available. You can try to enter on your, your own doctors and drugs in on Medicare.gov.
But what Medicare.gov doesn't do at the nuanced level that you need is a reason why most consumers enroll via a broker agent is to answer the detailed questions behind it. So doing a comparison against your current plan at something other than the face value premium, the face value benefits, the high-level description of benefit or a provider network depth, it is, it is very high level, and then you actually can't enroll off the website today. All you can do is do a little window shopping. You can see the products available. You can't answer, get questions answered, and ultimately you still need to go to the company of choice to enroll, which some people do. Plenty of people do. But most of this tool and our enrollments do not happen by consumers going to our website at all.
99% of our enrollments today come through outbound marketing that generates an inbound call that is facilitated by a live conversation with an agent, so this is not about marketplace tools. Those who want those may be doing that, but it's a very small portion of the population who are using Medicare.gov as the enrollment driver to ultimately get them in their plan directly, we have two buckets. One of the largest share of our bucket is internal. If I go back to my first slide here, I didn't walk you through that, but the question is, are our agents W-2 or 1099, and the lion's share of our agents are internal W-2 agents.
And the way we structure that is that we look at the seasonality of the business is such that about a third of your business is done in the 54 days of the Annual Enrollment Period in the Q4 . That's a third of our volume. The next third is in the Q1 of our total volume. And then in Q2 and Q3, you have a third of your volume between those two quarters. That's how the seasonality of the business goes. And so what we do is we staff W-2 that we think we can adequately get good return on our cash investment for that entire period of that seasonality. But because you have those big, you know, spikes in demand in those other periods, you want to have variable capacity.
So that's where we have our external agents that we have that we don't have to bear the fixed cost for. It's a variable cost only, smaller margin for it, but we do have access to them to be able to take advantage of market opportunities. Great question. The question was, outside of AEP, the traditional enrollment period where everybody has a shopping experience, who's enrolling through the rest of the year? There are generally certain populations who are eligible to enroll throughout the year. Those who have what we call a special enrollment period. If you're new to Medicare, that's an obvious one. If you move, have some significant life events, that's another one. If you live in a federal disaster area, that's another one. If you are dual eligible, have both Medicare and Medicaid, that's another one.
If you have chronic conditions, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, CHF, you have a few other disease states that you can enroll in any time in the year. There is a smaller population, but as I said, a third of our total submissions happen during that special enrollment period, which is Q2 and Q3. Yes, sir. Start out by saying Medicare Advantage. Is that it?
Like GoHealth is just for Medicare Advantage?
We only enroll consumers into Medicare Advantage plans today. We don't do Medicare supplements. We don't do anything else. We have a very focused business model today. Sorry, the question was if we only do Medicare Advantage, and that is a yes today. Other questions? Oh, sorry, we had one in the back. The question was, why hasn't there been consolidation? There actually, you know, there is two ways to think about there.
There has been a number of players within the industry who've not been able to make the cash equation work, and the lenders own those companies now. They own their assets, and they've stopped operating. There have been some larger organizations who've tried to go to market, Prudential being one, who had gotten into the space, acquired a company, put it in his portfolio, tried to sell it this year, and ultimately shut it down, because it couldn't find somebody willing to pay them what they wanted to get for the business.
We actually just did a transaction where we bought one of the other players in the industry called e-TeleQuote, and it was a very unique deal structure, where we effectively paid $0, and got over $100 million worth of asset value, including 400 licensed agents to operate, because we can operate that business and we have the technology to synergize and provide get more scale leverage out of those agents. So consolidation is happening, and we are the only one who's been a consolidator thus far, and we believe there will likely be more opportunities for consolidation to continue.
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Yes. Yeah. So the question was, do lenders who take over a backbook or a contract asset still need somebody to continue to operate to be eligible to receive those commissions? And the answer is you still need to service those books.
There's a lot of parties who could make you eligible for it. You mean you need to. I became a licensed agent when I took this job, in 2022, and that enables. I am the lead agent for all of our commission tails, right? The ability to be licensed, go through the training, retain your appointments, and then have the capacity to take service calls along the way. So yes, somebody needs to do that for them. You don't need to own the backbook. You could also. They have contract services that will do that for you too if you're a lender and want to do it. And there are some of our peers who've gotten into that business saying we'd rather just service lenders' books. And that is something that some companies do. Mm-hmm.
There are some companies who do that today and say they're more of a business process outsourcing for lenders to manage their books and continue them. The key is if you want to run an agency and continue to have licensed agents operating and do the marketing for them, et cetera, that's where you really need somebody who's not just a servicer, but has technology and tools, because otherwise, what are you acquiring? Agents without the efficiency of the tools are a liability. They are not an asset. They burn cash, and they are not going to make enough cash in the near term to generate, you to cover their costs. With our tools, like I said, just year over year in our own agent base, we increased our productivity in Q3, which is the least efficient period, by 46%.
And that's, that's something that is, we don't make available on the open market to others, built for purpose, and it is absolutely because of the tech and the training that we put forth match with our marketing that enables that. So I'll stop there. Other questions? Yes, sir.
Thinking that some people are going to be fleeing Medicare Advantage? Medicare.
Great. It's a great question. The question was, do you believe that given, let's say, call it, current dynamics that people will leave Medicare Advantage and go back to maybe Medicare Original or go buy a Medicare Supplement? Those are typically the ways that people, will get their coverage satisfied. Even though benefits have degraded this year, the, Milliman, who you may all know is a major actuarial firm, they do what they call an annual analysis of MA- CVAT.
That's their estimate of the incremental value of benefits versus traditional Medicare. And yeah, so in the last couple of years, it's been $3,000 plus annually better. And even with benefit degradation, maybe it's only $2,000 plus, but that's still a lot better than being on just Medicare Original and paying incremental premiums for Medicare Supplement. So I think there's more, what we see is they're more shifting a population between plan options, less people just walking away from Medicare Advantage because they can't afford to leave Medicare Advantage. It's still pretty valuable. And that dynamic is very good for us, right? Because if we are really the truly trusted, unbiased resource for them, more people who are set in that situation need to reset. And so they come through our shopping experience. And this is a market dynamic we've never seen.
If you think about plan exits this year, consumers who had to make a new choice, we had 2 million consumers this year. How many do you think it was last year? 100,000 members last year got displaced because their products left. 20x more this year of those. Plan degradations, people whose benefits got worse, 8 million consumers this year had plan degradations. That's nearly three, four times that you've seen in any previous year. This is the most disruptive we have seen and maybe will have seen. So as we think about those dynamics that are really efficient for our business model, they start this Q4 right now, and they will go for three consecutive quarters because those benefit dynamics go for a full 12 months. We start in October and run through the next September.
So Q1, Q2, Q3, through Q3 of next year should have the same general market dynamics that we're seeing this Q4. Any other questions? These are all very good. Yes, one more in the back. We have a lot of, it's really, we do QA on making sure that our policies are matching, that we've matched consumers with, with based on our lead scores. We look at how often our agents have written the top scores, the correlation between that PlanFit score and consumers staying on the product we wrote them on. We think consumers voting with their feet is the best way to measure whether our proprietary matching logic is working and that our agents are doing the right thing. So we look and we monitor from submission to effectuation, which is January 1st enrollment, and then through 90-day retention, right? Generally between selling to effectuation, that timeframe.
So if we write, I would sell somebody a new policy on October 15th. If they go shop again with somebody else before they get to effectuation on January 1, then we didn't do a good job of selling, really giving them a high-quality experience to give them the confidence they didn't need to shop again. And then if we did do a high-quality experience, but if they are effectuated January 1 and then disenroll before March 31st, then that is an indication that we didn't match them with the right product. So that's an indication of the technology. But those are the two ways that I would say are the simplest ways to measure it. I know we're over time. Thank you so much for your attention and your interest in it.