Alex Wayne

Enrollment in Obamacare health plans for small businesses is off to a slow start, leaving in doubt whether the U.S. program can attract enough customers to satisfy insurers.

About 70% of Obamacare’s customers are 35 years of age or older, indicating that U.S. health care overhaul is initially attracting a less healthy population that may drive up insurance premiums.

CGI Group, the company that built the main Obamacare website, will be replaced next month when its contract with the U.S. federal government expires, a person familiar with the decision said.

Most uninsured people in the U.S. have yet to try to sign up for health coverage under Obamacare, and a key advocacy group said it will hire more workers to reach those unfamiliar with the law.

The U.S. recession remained a drag on health care spending three years after it ended as a net of 9.4 million people lost private insurance coverage before key provisions of Obamacare had begun, a government report showed.

About 2.1 million people have medical coverage as of yesterday through Obamacare after a late surge in enrollment helped regain ground lost to the botched debut of insurance exchanges created by the U.S. health-care overhaul.

From emergency rooms to pharmacies to company human-resources departments, changes will unfold within the U.S. health-care system on Jan. 1 as the nation guarantees insurance coverage to all Americans for the first time, a goal that has eluded presidents and lawmakers since the end of World War Two.

From Maryland to Hawaii, Obamacare’s state-run enrollment operations are running into technical difficulties, creating new headaches for the White House even as the federal insurance website finds its footing.

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.

(Bloomberg) – Today’s deadline for Americans to sign up for Obamacare health coverage effective Jan. 1 was extended until midnight tomorrow as heavy traffic to the online enrollment system caused a queuing system to be activated. Government technicians deploy the queuing system when traffic at the site, healthcare.gov, approaches 50,000 simultaneous users. Customers can request that an e-mail automatically be sent when traffic subsides. …

The success of the health care overhaul relies on a diverse pool of customers where younger, healthier participants balance the costs of covering older, sicker people. Insurers say they can’t make more concessions without putting themselves at risk that patients will wait and sign up only when they need care.

Hundreds of thousands of people whose health plans are being canceled because their coverage doesn’t meet Obamacare rules will be exempt next year from the U.S. mandate that all Americans carry medical insurance.

Former Microsoft Corp. executive Kurt DelBene was named to replace Jeffrey Zients as the manager of the U.S. health insurance enrollment system, as Zients prepares to take over as White House chief economic adviser.

The government failed to send data to health insurers for about 15,000 people who enrolled in Obamacare through early December, an error corrected last week before it could jeopardize their coverage, the U.S. said.

Health insurers are being asked by the U.S. government to be lenient with Obamacare customers who miss the Dec. 23 deadline for enrolling in the program or are late with their initial payment. Meanwhile, Aetna says it will not renew canceled plans.

More than 250,000 Americans selected private health insurance plans through Obamacare enrollment systems last month, better than twice as many as in October when the exchanges opened amid technology errors and outages.

President Barack Obama’s health agency said it has spent $319 million building an online health-insurance marketplace through October.

More people signed up for Obamacare health plans in the first two days of December than in all of October after the U.S. government rehabilitated its error-prone insurance-exchange website.

The Obama administration says much of the site is fixed but it’s not clear still how much of that is true.

President Barack Obama raised the stakes on his three-year-old health care overhaul Sunday, declaring that fixes to his administration’s troubled insurance exchange website make it ready to sign up 800,000 people a day.