Covered California has begun offering online enrollments to small businesses, unaffected by the one-year delay in signups suffered by the federal Obamacare site.
The Covered California site underwent a scheduled outage of its enrollment functionality over the weekend ending Nov. 25 and will officially unveil the small-business health insurance service Monday.
The California exchange’s Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP), is designed for employers with 50 or fewer eligible employees. The smaller of these businesses can get tax credits for up to half of their premiums paid for employees. (Read about the small-business credits.)
Employers (and later employees) can sign up using the main portal on the Covered California web site. Clicking on the yellow “Start Here” button on the home page leads to a branched welcome page for individuals, employers and employees. (Using the upper navigation bar link to the SHOP section leads to what appears to be outdated pages, however.)
A powerpoint presentation offers instructions for using the online enrollment section for SHOP. Covered California says:
The new system enhancements now allow online enrollment functionality for SHOP, including online quoting, the ability to submit an online application at coveredca.com in real-time, and the ability for employers to initiate electronic open enrollment for their employees.
Other options include contacting the health insurance carriers directly and using an certified insurance agent.
“Since October more than 1,500 small business owners have begun the process of exploring whether the SHOP program is right for them,” said Covered California CEO Peter Lee.
Unlike with individually purchased coverage, there is no mandate to buy the insurance. “There is no penalty for not enrolling in SHOP and there is no additional fee for using a certified insurance agent (to enroll),” the small business section of the Covered California web site advises. That means the SHOP program is all carrot, no stick, especially given the tax credits benefit:
Small businesses are eligible for a federal health care tax credit if they have fewer than 25 full-time-equivalent employees for the tax year, pay employees an average of less than $50,000 per year and contribute at least 50 percent of their employees’ premium cost. Employers with 10 or fewer full-time-equivalent employees with wages averaging $25,000 or less per year are eligible for the maximum amount of tax credits.
Employers in states dependent on the troubled HealthCare.gov web site won’t be able to set up their health insurance programs online, but they still can get coverage (and tax credits) using paper applications with the help of brokers. The delay in this online functionality, until November 2014, was announced Nov. 27 as a triage measure as the government scrambles to make its web site enrollments reliable.
“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 said.
The limitation for the states without a working SHOP web site “doesn’t change the fact that the marketplace can offer the most competitive combination of price and quality for small businesses purchasing health insurance,” said John Arensmeyer, CEO of the Small Business Majority group. “… (But) it’s important it get up and running as soon as possible.”
One of the selling points of the SHOP initiative was its reduction in administrative headaches for small businesses that want to offer health benefits.
In a related delay that predates the launch of the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges, larger businesses were given another year to bring their health care programs into compliance with Obamacare.
The small-business web site delays have added yet more confusion to the Obamacare landscape:
“We are disappointed that communications surrounding implementation of the law have not been more effective at informing small businesses of their insurance options,” the Small Business Majority said.
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