While some House Republicans continued to look for ways to use federal budget negotiations to kill the new public exchanges, the exchange builders were preparing for launch.
Among them, managers of Covered California, the Golden State's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act exchange, scheduled five media events for Tuesday, the official exchange program launch day.
The exchange media staff promised that Covered California board members would be available to "mark this historic day" in Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco.
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Covered California staffers this week drew a large online crowd by holding a live webcast to show people the exchange enrollment system.
Elsewhere, PPACA compliance specialists at Mercer warned employers during a webinar that they need to pay close attention to employees' use of the public exchanges, even if employers can wait until 2015 to comply with PPACA health benefits coverage and benefits reporting rules.
If employers simply let workers who have access to affordable, high-quality health employer-sponsored health benefits lie about lack of benefits to qualify for the new federal tax credits for the uninsured, those workers could end up having to come up with huge amounts of cash to pay the government back for the ill-gotten tax credits, the Mercer PPACA experts warned.
Health producers and their clients, of course, still have many unanswered questions about the public exchanges.
In New Jersey, for example, consumers and advisors struggled to find out whether the federally run exchange in that state will offer stand-alone dental plans.
Meanwhile, private exchanges are touting their offerings.
Liazon Corp., for example, reported that more than 200 employers have signed up to use its private exchange program already this year, increasing its total employer count to 2,400.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
