Exchanges

The back-end payment system of Healthcare.gov is still being built, a senior Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services official said Thursday in testimony on Capitol Hill.

The deadline to enroll in health plans that begin Jan. 1 was extended to midnight today from yesterday for most of the U.S., the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said. The extension was announced as healthcare.gov yesterday experienced a single-day record number of visits and consumers were moved into a queuing system deployed when the website approaches 50,000 simultaneous users.

The decision by CMS leaves just eight days for insurers to send bills to those signing up on the last day of the enrollment period.

Most health plan cancellation notices are being delivered to individuals who had coverage that is now out of line with the Affordable Care Act. But some the changes are also affecting small employers who must decide whether to pay the higher costs for new coverage, or send workers to purchasing exchanges.

Helen Darling, NBGH president and CEO, says about a third (32%) of employees surveyed also believe that the overall quality of their health care benefits will drop as the ACA begins to roll out.

Cigna has instructed brokers to halt selling insurance to individuals who are subsidy-eligible through its federal health care exchange broker portals.

The calculator that determines subsidies for the 36 states relying on the federal government for exchanges come Oct. 1 isn’t working in tests, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Experts from Aon Hewitt and Digital Insurance who have private exchanges say communicating early and

Officials from the 17 exchanges, including D.C., that will run separate from the federal government share how they are training brokers to be involved.

Federal officials now will allow some insurers to wait until 2015 to comply with the consumer protection.