Health insurance in Dallas and Fort Worth.

Two carriers are leaving DFW for 2027. This is the year to look.

Cigna and Baylor Scott and White are both exiting the Texas individual market, and both sell in Dallas County today.

This is the most important thing on this page and it is time-sensitive.

Cigna HealthCare of Texas and Baylor Scott and White are both absent from the 2027 individual-market filings. Both sell in Dallas County for 2026. Neither sells in Harris County, which is why this is a Dallas-Fort Worth story rather than a Texas one. Access to Care Health Plan and Scott and White Health Plan are leaving as well.

If you hold one of those plans, you are not going to be left uninsured. The Marketplace will move you to a similar plan from another company automatically if you do nothing. That automatic move is where people get hurt. Nothing in it checks whether your doctors are in the new network or your prescriptions are on the new drug list, and with no PPOs available anywhere in Texas, a network mismatch is not a small problem.

The Baylor Scott and White exit deserves particular attention, because it is a provider-owned plan. Members chose it partly for access to that system. A replacement plan may or may not include the same hospitals.

• Read the discontinuation notice when it arrives. Federal rules require written notice ahead of a carrier withdrawing, usually in the fall alongside renewal mail.
• Your 2026 coverage does not change. This is about January 2027, and the work worth doing now is free: confirm your doctors and list your medications.
• Four carriers are also entering Texas for 2027, including CHRISTUS Health Plan and Harbor Health, so the replacement field is not smaller, just different.

Who sells individual coverage in Dallas and Tarrant County

Ten carriers in Dallas County, nine in Tarrant, and the lists are not identical.

Texas sets plan availability county by county, and Dallas and Tarrant are not the same market. For 2026, Dallas County has ten individual-market issuers including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, UnitedHealthcare, Oscar, Ambetter from Superior HealthPlan, Molina, Imperial, WellPoint, Cigna, and Baylor Scott and White. Tarrant County has a similar field without Baylor Scott and White.

Between the two counties that is one of the deepest fields in Texas, which sounds like good news and mostly is. The catch is the same statewide: not one of them is a PPO. Every option is an HMO, POS, or EPO, and none runs a national network. DFW is a metro where a lot of households have doctors spread across Baylor Scott and White, Texas Health Resources, UT Southwestern, and Methodist, and no single narrow network is likely to contain all of them.

Dallas and Fort Worth are two different insurance markets

They are one metro to you and two separate county markets to an insurer, and the plan lists are not the same.

People move freely across the DFW metroplex, and insurers do not. Texas sets plan availability by county, so Dallas County and Tarrant County have different carrier lists, and the county line runs straight through a metro where plenty of households live on one side and see doctors on the other.

Baylor Scott and White sells individual coverage in Dallas County for 2026 but not in Tarrant. If you live in Fort Worth and work in Dallas, or the reverse, your plan options are decided by where you sleep, not where your doctor is. With no PPOs sold anywhere in Texas, and no national networks, that is the detail most likely to cost you.

It is also the single most common thing we fix on a DFW quote: someone shopped on price, did not check which county their specialist bills from, and found out in February.

One pricing quirk to check before you pick a metal

If you are paying full price, compare Gold before Silver. In Texas the usual ordering is reversed.

Texas loads the cost of cost-sharing reductions onto Silver premiums, which inflates the benchmark and makes subsidies larger. Good if you get one. If you pay full price, it means the cheapest Gold plan is priced below the cheapest Silver plan in all 27 Texas rating areas, usually with a lower deductible too. Our Texas coverage page walks through why. The short version for DFW: do not default to Silver without pricing Gold first.

If your income is above the subsidy line

Above 400 percent of poverty the credit is zero, and most Texans in that position have left the exchange entirely.

About 93 percent of Texas Marketplace enrollees receive a premium tax credit, averaging roughly $41 a month net among those who do. Above 400 percent of the federal poverty level the credit drops to zero with no taper, and the enhanced credits that used to soften that edge expired at the end of 2025.

Only about 1.9 percent of Texas Marketplace enrollees sit above that line, against roughly 6.2 percent in Arizona. Higher-earning households have largely stopped buying exchange coverage in Texas, and Texas carries the highest uninsured rate in the nation.

DFW has a lot of those households: consultants, contractors, small business owners, and professionals between roles. We price the exchange at full cost, price private coverage beside it, and tell you which actually wins for your situation.

Enrollment windows, and when to actually start

Open enrollment opens November 1, and in a year when two carriers are leaving, doing nothing is a decision.

Texas uses the federal HealthCare.gov calendar. Open enrollment opens November 1 for coverage starting January 1. The closing date has been shifting under recent federal rule changes, so we confirm the live deadline with you rather than print one.

In an ordinary year, auto-renewal is a small mistake. In a year when your carrier is leaving the state, it is close to guaranteed to be an expensive one. If you are with Cigna or Baylor Scott and White in DFW, put a reminder in for early November.

• A qualifying life event opens a 60-day window outside open enrollment: losing job coverage, moving, marriage, divorce, a birth, or certain income changes.
• Losing coverage lets you enroll in the 60 days before it ends, which is the cleaner play when you can see the date coming.

What working with us looks like, and what we are not

Independent, licensed in Texas, free to you, and not a Dallas office you can walk into.

We are an independent agency rather than a captive of one carrier, so we compare across the companies we are appointed with and recommend what fits, including when the answer is to stay put. Our help costs you nothing, because the carrier builds the same commission into the premium whether you use an agent or not.

We are not a Dallas storefront. Apex Health Advisors is based in the Phoenix North Valley and licensed across Texas, and the work happens by phone, video, and email. If you want someone to sit across a desk from in Dallas, we are not that. If you want someone who has read the plan documents for your county and will tell you plainly which plan is wrong for you, that is what this is.