Health law business-insurance site delayed 1 year
Associated Press
CHICAGO
The Obama administration is delaying yet another aspect of the health care law, putting off until next November the launch of an online portal to the health insurance marketplace for small businesses.
The move, announced Wednesday, was needed because repairs still are underway to the troubled HealthCare.gov website, which is the primary way for individuals to apply for insurance, and that has priority, federal officials said.
In a conference call with reporters, administration officials said employers who want to buy marketplace plans for their workers now will need to go through an agent, broker or insurance company this year, instead of using the government website. The administration said the plan still will allow small businesses to buy coverage but avoid slowing technical repairs to the hobbled federal online site.
Under the health care law, most small businesses do not have to provide coverage. But firms with 50 or more employees face a mandate to offer insurance or risk fines from the government in 2015.
The HealthCare.gov site, where individuals without employer-sponsored health care can shop for insurance, is now smoothly handling 25,000 users at the same time and is on track to meet its goal of handling 50,000 simultaneous users by Saturday, said administration spokeswoman Julie Bataille. “We have a lot of work left to do in the next few days,” she said.
In a related development, the Department of Health and Human Services is switching contractors for the health care website, a decision it says came months before the online marketplace opened and multiple problems were identified.
A department official said Wednesday its contract with Verizon subsidiary Terremark ends in March. A new contract was awarded to Hewlett-Packard Co. in July.
Terremark was responsible for what’s known as the federal data services hub, a conduit for verifying personal information from people applying for benefits under the new health care law. The hub has experienced outages blamed on Terremark