Benefits brokers who have held off on selling CHOICE Arrangements, the new federal name for ICHRAs, can now hand the employee enrollment work to eHealth and keep their agent-of-record status. The change comes through a new partnership between eHealth and benefits administration platform BerniePortal.
The deal connects more than 5,000 employers and over 1,000 insurance brokers who work with BerniePortal to eHealth.
eHealth will run needs analyses and help review CHOICE options, and its licensed agents will then help employees use their employer-provided benefit dollars to buy and enroll in individual and family health plans.
Employee support is an area brokers have raised as an obstacle to selling the model. In TASC's 2026 Broker ICHRA Survey, 54% of brokers said they had never sold an ICHRA, up from 47% in 2025, and 85% cited employee confusion as a concern.
Brokers who had sold the product said employee education and enrollment took longer than expected, and full broker support for the model fell from 48% to 29%.
TASC, which sells ICHRA administration services, also found that brokers now give more weight to enrollment support and ease of administration when they choose a partner.
Read more: Half of brokers still haven't sold an ICHRA and the gap is showing
The partnership includes dedicated onboarding, shopping, and enrollment support for employers and employees, along with education and training for the transition. Workers can choose from hundreds of Affordable Care Act (ACA)-compliant plans.
Brokers who bring clients into the program keep agent-of-record status, which the companies said allows them to preserve existing client relationships. The announcement does not say how commissions on the individual policies will be shared between brokers and eHealth.
Agent-of-record terms vary across the market. A Peterson-KFF analysis found that some ICHRA administrators take over the agent-of-record role at renewal and move commission income away from the original broker. Others split commissions or build a per-employee-per-month fee into the administrator contract to keep the broker involved, and no standard structure exists.
BerniePortal, an HR platform founded in 2008 that sells to small employers through a network of benefit brokers, will run the arrangements on its system. Employers can set contributions by employee class and track enrollments and participation rates in real time.
Alex Tolbert, president of BerniePortal, said the partnership responds to broker requests.
"Our brokers tell us they want to offer their clients' employees real choice, but with administrative ease," he said.
He also described how the work is divided. "eHealth brings the individual marketplace capabilities, and BerniePortal helps make CHOICE Arrangements easy to run for the broker and HR," Tolbert said.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Small Business Administration began using the CHOICE name on September 3, 2026, and unveiled it at an event in Indiana. The mechanism of the arrangements, which have existed since 2020, did not change.
Employer uptake has risen even as broker sentiment has cooled. The HRA Council reported that more than 20,000 US businesses offered an ICHRA in 2026, up 53% from 2025, with covered lives above 500,000.
eHealth CEO Derrick Duke pointed to cost pressure on employers. "Health benefit costs are one of the biggest pressures employers face today, and CHOICE Arrangements can give them a way to offer meaningful coverage while helping reduce the cost unpredictability associated with a traditional group plan," he said.
The companies cite average savings of approximately 17% on healthcare costs. According to the release, the figure comes from an eHealth analysis of third-party data that compared individual rates with group plan rates in Ohio, Minnesota, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Florida.
Individual market pricing has shifted over the past two years. KFF found a national median proposed ACA premium increase of 15% for 2027, after a finalized 20% median increase in 2026, while small group premiums face a proposed median increase of 14%.
Read next: ACA premiums are rising again in 2027 - here's the broker conversation
Duke said BerniePortal already works closely with employers and brokers, and a direct connection to eHealth's team will let more employers evaluate CHOICE Arrangements.
The BerniePortal deal follows an ICHRA partnership eHealth announced in June with administration platform Nexben. That broker-facing product combined eHealth's enrollment operation with Nexben's ICHRA administration and payment technology.
eHealth, which has sold individual and family plans for nearly three decades, reported second-quarter revenue of $33.6 million, down 45% year over year as Medicare enrollment slowed. Management told investors that ICHRA revenue would stay below $5 million in 2026 and cited industry forecasts of about five million ICHRA lives by 2029.
