New Hampshire Will Not Have The Employee Choice Model On The SHOP Exchange In 2015

Although the individual exchange gets most of the press, there is a second exchange available for purchasing insurance, the SHOP exchange, which is designed for small businesses to purchase group insurance plans. The original vision for this exchange was that it would offer employees the opportunity to choose from multiple carriers and multiple plans, much like most 401(k) plans offered by companies, which have a complete menu of investment choices from multiple mutual fund companies.

Because of all the problems implementing the individual exchange in 2014, all work on the SHOP exchange was suspended, and it was launched as a paper application process only, with no website. It did not offer the employee choice feature, either. As a result, subscription to this plan in 2014 has been extremely anemic, although it is hard to tell how much of a disaster it has been, given the fact that CMS will not release any numbers to Congress, despite numerous requests for this data.

It was expected that in 2015, since CMS had an entire year to work on this SHOP exchange, that it would be implemented according to the vision of the 2010 legislation, with the employee choice model fully operational. In New Hampshire, this will not be the case, as we are one of 18 states who decided not to offer an employee choice feature until the federal website and infrastructure are in place, and can prove that it can function with a single carrier model. I feel this is an extremely wise choice by the state of New Hampshire, because the added complexity of employee choice would probably continue to doom this stillborn exchange to further failure. It is best to get the process working in a simplified way, and then expand upon it, rather than roll out something as clunky and disastrous as the individual exchange rollout proved to be last year.