Extending Insurance May Help Small Businesses, But Not Most Individual Plans

While state officials agreed yesterday to allow recently cancelled health insurance plans to be extended for a year, the move may not make much difference to most individual plan holders.

A spokesman for Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, the state’s largest individual plan insurer, said that extending the most popular individual plans won’t be “viable” because they would still have to be altered to comply with other requirements of the Affordable Care Act.

As a result, it appears likely that most individual plan holders will still have to pay higher monthly premiums starting in January. President Obama said on November 14 that states could extend plans that were scheduled to be cancelled for one more year until 2014. The decision was left to each state’s insurance commissioner.

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