Health insurance agency laying off 196, closing Sunrise headquarters

Ron Hurtibise, South Florida Sun-SentinelSouth Florida Sun Sentinel

Enhance Health LLC, an insurance agency that two years ago said it planned to hire 800 workers in Broward County, now plans to lay off 196 workers and close its Sunrise headquarters.

The company was one of several accused last year of defrauding Obamacare enrollees — accusations it has denied. The closure and layoffs, effective on April 22, were announced in a notice dated Feb. 21 and posted Monday by the Florida Department of Commerce’s Division of Workforce Services.

At a lunch event in May 2023, Broward County’s public-private workforce development agency, Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, announced Enhance Health’s move to offices in Sunrise and Coral Springs along with plans to double its staff in the county from 400 to 800.

The company was described as “a professional services company leveraging technology and a concierge experience to streamline the health insurance process.”

Bain Capital Insurance announced the company’s launch in a news release in November 2021. Funded with $150 million in total capital and a “capital commitment” led by Bain, the company was positioned to “pursue a growth strategy to build a leading Medicare insurance distribution and care navigation platform through acquisition and organic initiatives,” according to the release.

Maggie Gunther, spokeswoman for the Alliance, said the organization did not offer incentives to Enhance Health for moving into the Sunrise and Coral Springs locations.

“We had hoped the company would earn performance-based incentives from the City of Miramar and Broward County for job creation in (a planned expansion to) Miramar, however, because the Miramar location didn’t come to fruition, no incentives were finalized for the company,” she said.

While no layoff notice has been filed with the state regarding the Coral Springs customer service center, a phone number listed for the North University Drive address is out of service and a Coral Springs spokeswoman said that the company has no active business tax with the city.

An April 2024 federal lawsuit accused it and several affiliates of participating in a scheme to switch agents and insurance plans of Affordable Care Act enrollees without their knowledge. To identify the consumers, the companies relied on social media ads falsely promising cash subsidies, the suit said.

Attorneys representing Enhance Health and five other lawsuit defendants denied the allegations in November.

In August, two of the defendants operating in South Florida — Benefitalign LLC and TrueCoverage LLC — were barred by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from accessing the federal government’s ACA marketplace platform. The CMS’ suspension notice cited the lawsuit’s allegations of fraudulent activity as well as concerns that the companies had accessed the ACA database from foreign locations and past issues in which the companies failed to comply with CMS regulations.

The civil case, scheduled for trial in Fort Lauderdale in 2026, has been placed on administrative hold as the parties prepare to attend court-ordered mediation in April.

A spokeswoman for Enhance Health on Wednesday said that the layoff and closure notices were not tied to the lawsuit. She provided this statement:

“As we invest strategically in growing segments of our business to best provide Americans access to affordable healthcare coverage, we are consolidating back office functions at our new headquarters in Clearwater where we continue to hire for open positions.”

Positions that the layoff notice stated would be cut include 34 inbound ACA call center workers, 22 ACA “welcome call” workers, 27 quality assurance analysts, 15 learning and development specialists, and nine help desk analysts.

Today, only two locations — Clearwater, in the Tampa Bay area, and Austin, Texas — are mentioned on a job opening page on the company’s website.

Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can be reached by phone at 954-356-4071 or by email at [email protected].