The White House will hold off on launching its online health exchange where small businesses can shop for coverage until November 2014, an HHS official confirmed Wednesday.
Small businesses will still have the option to purchase coverage through the new marketplace but will not be able to do so online. Instead, until next fall, employers with fewer than 50 workers will need to work through a broker or agent to buy health plans for their employees.
"We’ve concluded that we can best serve small employers by continuing this offline process while we concentrate on both creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP Marketplace, and adding key new features, including an employee choice option and premium aggregation services, by November 2014," the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services wrote in a Q&A distributed to health law stakeholders.
Health law supporters expressed frustration at the decision, but said they still support the overall goal of making it easier for small businesses to shop for coverage.
"It’s disappointing that the online portion of the federal small business marketplace through
Healthcare.gov will be delayed and it’s important it get up and running as soon as possible," said John Arensmeyer, president of the Small Business Majority, a nonprofit that supports the Affordable Care Act. "However, it doesn’t change the fact that the marketplace can offer the most competitive combination of price and quality for small businesses purchasing health insurance."
The Small Business Health Options Program, or SHOP Exchange, has already
had a troubled launch with multiple delays as the Obama administration has focused much of its efforts on launching the individual insurance marketplace where Americans can shop for subsidized health insurance coverage.
The White House announced last April a one-year delay to the "consumer choice" function in the SHOP exchange, which would allow each employee to pick their own insurance plan, pushing that functionality back until the 2015 open enrollment season.
That delay was followed with another setback in September when the White House announced that online shopping in the small business exchange would not be available when open enrollment started in October.
Under the new Obama administration proposal, small businesses will now have to "go directly to an agent, broker or to an insurance company with plans certified by the Marketplace," the Q&A document states. "The insurer must agree to offer direct enrollment in SHOP coverage and to conduct enrollment according to HHS requirements."
The agent or broker will "help the employer fill out a paper application for SHOP eligibility and send it in to the SHOP Marketplace."