Obama, flanked by new registrants and small business owners speaking about the Affordable Care Act at the White House in October (Photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times via Redux)
Benefits
By John Tozzi November 27, 2013
The piece of healthcare.gov meant for small businesses won’t work for an additional year, the White House admitted today. The administration is sending small businesses to insurance agents and brokers for the next year to buy health insurance.
The Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP), intended to give companies with less than 50 employees an easy way to compare and buy health plans online, has been mired in delays. After initially planning the SHOP launch for Oct. 1, the Obama administration postponed it until November. Last month it set Nov. 30 as its precise deadline. Now the administration says it will be ready by November 2014.
“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,” the administration said, according to an internal document outlining the new enrollment process that was provided to Bloomberg Businessweek. An official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the delay.
The change applies only to the federal health exchange. States that built their own small business marketplaces are unaffected by today’s announcement.
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Shesh-
It’s not supposed to work for another year.
A large reason Small Business’s are exempt (Yes, all those claims about small businesses being forced to fire employees are lies) for a year- is to let the chips settle in the individual markets.
For once the claim “It’s a feature” rings true.
Even on this site I’ve read comments “My friend who has a small business is being run out of business because of Obamacare”
Which is BS because that part of the law hasn’t kicked in yet.
not a lie … I handed out pink slips due to Obamascare
So, how much did your health care costs go up?
Even though your company is exempt for a year….
Which means….. zero…….
Why would you hand out pink slips now? You have a year?
Or is your business failing and you used….. Oh never mind….
5.5 MILLION of us lost our insurance!
157,000 enrolled in Obamacare
So this means Obamacare is working for Americans?
You people in inland wherever – you are so stupid. Obamacare is working fine. All of the so-called outages on the website is a conspiracy by the right-wing kooks. You kooks made up all those fake numbers.
SF Dem, I know.
I’ve been hoping that the Administrator will poke his or her head in and try to straighten up this swill, but I am slowly, starting to get this feeling that the administrator built this site for people to be little parrots of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbough.
No facts, no numbers, no references….. just snarky comments.
“…You people in inland wherever – you are so stupid…”
Yeah, you’re message rings true. I’m feeling a little stupid for trying.
It appears that it’s just 4 or 5 of the same people that post anonymously.
I think I’m the stupid one for trying.
Huh…. it takes one of my own to shake me out of this.
Have fun old people. Bye.