Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the Obama administration is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees — a major selling point for the health care legislation.

If a business can only offer one health plan option through the Health Insurance Exchange instead of being able to offer multiple plans from multiple carriers, then the Exchanges for small businesses will be much less attractive than many already view them. Ironically, private Exchanges will probably be first to market with multi-carrier exchange programs for small businesses. They already exist in California.