In an era of Google Glass, Siri, and Snapchat, small businesses will still have to enroll for some new health insurance plans by paper or phone. The White House admitted that on-going problems with the federal e-commerce website, healthcare.gov, will delay the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) Exchange until Nov 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,” wrote the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
Right now, the administration has conscripted every geek on hand to fix enrollment for the individual market, with the hopes of snagging enough young-invincibles to lower the costs of everyone else. The New York Times reports that the malfunctioning healthcare.gov website is now able to handle 50,000 concurrent users, the original goal for the failed launch on October 1st.
“With this new delay, small businesses will likely see little change in the way they purchase health insurance until 2015. They will, however, need to use the SHOP exchange if they want to access a health law tax credit available to employers with fewer than 25 employees,” explains The Washington Post, in their early report of the announcement.
When they do enroll, they'll have to figure out how to sharpen a pencil.
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