Health exchange

As a Dec. 23 enrollment deadline for health insurance that starts Jan. 1 looms, New York state is staffing up its call center and smoothing out the rough spots on its application to meet growing demand. As time runs down, the state is trying to fix technical and design issues that came up when the site debuted in October.

One of the big questions now is what will happen if the federal health insurance website can't be fixed soon. Will the government penalize people for not having insurance if they couldn't realistically buy it?

Now that enrollment has opened for coverage under the Affordable Care Act, one of the biggest questions people have is, what's the deadline? It's Dec. 15 if you want coverage to start on Jan. 1. But open enrollment actually runs through March 2014. After that, you'll generally have to wait until next fall.

Florida resisted implementing the Affordable Care Act. Now, in the absence of the state encouraging people to sign up for insurance on exchanges set up under it, other groups have stepped in.

If all goes as planned, people who don't have insurance will be able to shop for it on online insurance marketplaces starting Tuesday. As long as people sign up by Dec. 15, they'll be covered starting Jan. 1.

According to a report released by the Department of Health and Human Services, "premiums nationwide will ... be around 16 percent lower than originally expected," and 95 percent of uninsured people live in a state with average premiums that are lower than expected.

The state fought hard against Obama's Affordable Care Act. Now Gov. Rick Scott's administration is questioning the use of federally funded navigators to enroll residents in health care exchanges.

For online insurance brokers, selling health insurance through the Affordable Care Act presents a new opportunity — and a new competitor. It's unclear who will come out ahead: the businesses, with more experience, or the feds, who won't charge commissions.

States are taking very different marketing tacks to get residents to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. In their own ways, they're trying hard to make insurance appealing to uninsured young people.