Independent ACA agent · Illinois
Every Qualified Health Plan sold in your county, priced for your household, with the tax credit shown next to the sticker price rather than instead of it. Run it yourself in about ten minutes, or call Edward and do it together.
Licensed producer of record
Edward Gudas
A National Producer Number is public. Look either of these up on the NIPR register before you tell anyone your income.
Open Enrollment closes January 15, 2026
Station 01
Four things decide whether a plan is right, and only one of them is the number in the advert. This is the whole of it, in the order it matters.
Two numbers matter. What the insurer charges, and what leaves your account after the advance premium tax credit. This site shows both on every plan, always in that order, because only one of them shows up on your tax return.
A low premium with a nine thousand dollar deductible is a bet that you will not need care. Sometimes that is the right bet. The survey puts premium, deductible and out-of-pocket maximum on the same card so you can make it deliberately.
A plan is a network and a formulary wearing a price tag. Add your prescriptions and your doctors in the survey and the results are filtered against the Marketplace’s own formulary and network data, not against a plan name that sounds right.
Thirty per cent of US ZIP codes span more than one county, and one spans six. Availability and price change across that line. When your ZIP is ambiguous the survey stops and asks rather than quoting you a plan you cannot buy.
Station 02
Edward Gudas is an independent producer. That means he is appointed with insurers rather than employed by one, and the same person who quotes you is the one who picks up in March when a claim goes sideways.
What that does not mean: he is not the Marketplace, he cannot change a filed premium, and he cannot make an insurer cover a doctor who is out of network. An agent who tells you otherwise is selling something else.
Station 03
Seven steps. Location, household, income, prescriptions, plans, consent, review. You can leave and come back inside the same tab, and every step is linkable.
Plan data comes from the federal Marketplace API, which covers the states that use HealthCare.gov. Illinois moved to its own state exchange for the 2026 plan year, so the survey will offer you 2025 pricing there and say why. Edwardquotes the Illinois exchange directly.
Demonstration only. Demonstration site. Nothing you enter here is sent to the Health Insurance Marketplace, to CMS, or to any insurance carrier, and nothing is stored on a server.
About ten minutes. Nothing is submitted anywhere, and you can stop at any point.
Station 04
The metal level is not a quality rating. It is roughly what share of a typical population’s total medical costs the plan pays. A Bronze plan is not a worse plan; it is a plan that leaves more of the bill with you.
Actuarial values are the standard ranges CMS publishes for each tier. They describe an average across a whole population, not what you personally will pay.
Station 05
Plans get retired, and the Marketplace maps their members onto a successor. Do nothing at Open Enrollment and that successor is usually what you wake up in. Put your plan ID in and see it before it happens.
Questions
No. Marketplace premiums are set by the insurer and filed with regulators. The price is identical whether you enrol through an agent, on HealthCare.gov, or by phone with the Marketplace call center. Edward is paid a commission by the insurance company you choose, and that commission is already inside the filed rate.
Because plan availability and price are set county by county, and about thirty per cent of US ZIP codes sit in more than one county. One ZIP in Mississippi spans six. Guessing the county would quote you plans you cannot buy, so the survey asks instead.
The premium is what the insurer charges. The advance premium tax credit is a subsidy paid on your behalf directly to the insurer each month, based on your expected income for the year. The second number is what leaves your account. If your income ends up higher than you estimated, some of the credit is reconciled on your tax return, which is why the estimate should be honest rather than flattering.
Below two hundred and fifty per cent of the federal poverty level, a cost-sharing reduction attaches to Silver plans and only to Silver plans. It lowers the deductible and the out-of-pocket maximum, often dramatically. A Bronze plan with a lower premium can still cost more across a year once you use the coverage.
You are usually auto-enrolled into whatever plan the Marketplace crosswalk maps your current one to, at next year’s price and with next year’s tax credit. That is often not the plan you would have picked. The crosswalk tool on this page shows you where your plan is going before it happens.
No. Answers live in your browser tab and are cleared when you close it. The submission endpoint assembles a record at the edge, hands it straight back to your browser, and writes nothing to any server or database. Nothing is transmitted to the Marketplace, to CMS or to any insurance company.
Station 06
The survey is thorough on purpose, but a five-minute call usually settles what a form cannot: whether your doctor is really in that network, whether the employer plan you were offered counts as affordable, whether the income you are about to type is the income the Marketplace means.
You do not need a Social Security number to get a quote, and this demonstration never asks for one.