Julie Rovner

The Obama Administration this week announced yet another delay for small businesses seeking to purchase health insurance on the troubled HealthCare.gov website. Ari Shapiro and Julie Rovner discuss how the small business part of the program keeps getting pushed to the end of the administration's priority list.

No online registration for you, the Obama administration told small-business owners interested in using the Affordable Care Act exchanges to buy employee health insurance. Online access was pushed back to November 2014. Employers can still enroll through an insurer or broker.

European drug regulators are warning that the emergency contraceptive called Plan B does not work in women who weigh 176 pounds or more. The warning follows a September study showing an increased number of pregnancies in women who had taken Plan B.

After a rocky start, the HealthCare.gov website is supposed to be able to handle 50,000 simultaneous users by the end of the month. That figure would represent about double the site's current capacity. An expected surge in demand will present a new test.

If you advertise it, they will come. Sign-ups for Medicaid are brisk, even in states that haven't expanded their programs with an infusion of federal dollars. Experts call that the "woodwork effect" — getting the word out to people who were already eligible.

President Obama's proposal — designed to help reverse the recent cancellation of some health policies — seems to leave the decision up to insurance companies. But there are other decision-makers in the mix who are just as important: state regulators.

Letting people keep their old health insurance policies might solve a political problem, but it will create major headaches for the insurance industry, state regulators say. It also could drain healthy people from the risk pool for Affordable Care Act coverage, increasing rates there.

The Obama administration says just about 100,000 people managed to choose health plans through the federal and state health exchanges during their first month of the program. Critics say that shows the law is failing. But most analysts say the first month's numbers wouldn't have meant very much, even if the federal website had been working properly.

Just over 100,000 people managed to get signed up for health insurance through the state and federal health exchanges, the Obama administration reported. But barely a quarter of those — 26,794 — signed up through the faltering HealthCare.gov website.

Even former President Clinton is asking the Obama administration to let people whose private health insurance policies have been canceled keep that insurance, at least for a while. But insurance industry executives say reviving those policies would be difficult to impossible.

There's been a lot of speculation about how many people have signed up for Affordable Care Act insurance. The official number will be reported at the end of the week. But unofficial estimates are leaking out, including 50,000 reported today. That's far less than the 500,000 that the administration originally predicted.

Self-employed workers are some of the people who could benefit most from insurance under the Affordable Care Act, but figuring out how much coverage will cost can be tricky. Well, we've got answers for them, and also for people wondering about what happens if they don't have any insurance at all.