Four months into the launch of California’s health-insurance exchange for small-business plans, the website has been closed, according to a Washington Post report.
State officials shut down the site in order to “implement a series of redesigns” because the “portal was not meeting the needs of agents or small employers and needed improvements,” the executive director of Cover California said.
The California Small Business Health Options Program Web portal, or SHOP, was operated through the larger Covered California exchange, which has had problems of its own from the start. Covered California ran up a massive backlog of 25,000 paper applications, and its website had trouble sending application information to insurers (many people who purchased insurance have yet to receive confirmation that they are covered).
Officials say that small-business plans can still be purchased over the phone or via paper applications. The state hopes the website will be back online in the fall.