The atten­tion was all paid to the indi­vid­ual plans that sud­den­ly made health care “afford­able” – if you received a sub­sidy (from which the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is backpedal­ing furi­ous­ly).  But along­side the indi­vid­ual plans the gov­ern­ment decid­ed that doing group insur­ance was a necessity…and it is the only vehi­cle that allows for the receipt of the small group health insur­ance tax cred­it.  This was sup­posed to help sales, even though the first two years of the pro­gram qual­i­fi­ca­tion was open for any plan, and bare­ly tak­en (espe­cial­ly in Cal­i­for­nia).  So now there is no sur­prise to find that the sale of the SHOP plan has not met expec­ta­tions.  Dif­fi­cul­ty in ser­vice, the lack of flex­i­bil­i­ty in choice, nar­row net­works and oth­er prob­lems do not make it palat­able in the mar­ket, and thus less than 12,000 busi­ness­es signed up in the first 8 months.