On the NYTimes.com’s You’re the Boss Blog, Paul Downs, founder of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers outside of Philadelphia, offers seven hard-earned conclusions he has reached about the new world of small business health insurance.

Quote:

The Affordable Care Act has fundamentally restructured the insurance market. Business owners now have a better way to shop for coverage, with more plan choices and a more uniform set of standards that make comparing options much easier. There are lots of ways to save money while also offering employees a wider range of choices. As everyone knows, the new system is a mess right now, but it is a vast improvement over our previous mess.

That said, none of the players in my market, including HealthCare.gov, my agent, and the private insurance companies, have figured out how to communicate the precise nature of their offerings and the best path to a decision. None of the sites I looked at is easy to understand and use. Nobody has figured out a good way to deliver pricing information. All of the quotes I got were confusing and showed only a small subset of my actual set of choices. Truth to tell, I came to a good understanding of my options only by spending hours on the phone with a vice president of sales at Independence Blue Cross who called me after my last post — and even he was baffled by many of my questions.

Read entire blog post: Seven Conclusions About Small-Business Health Insurance