It seems like all you have to say here is that there exist ACA-noncompliant plans. Yes, that was always the case. Why would you buy one of them? The major reason people end up in exempt plans is that they somehow miss enrollment (or have a payment snafu that gets them bounced from their compliant plan --- ask me how I know that). But this product appears to generate a new enrollment window; you can just buy ACA-compliant marketplace plans with it.
You would be surprised how common missed payment issues are. Many carriers will only notify you via paper mail, so it's easy to miss. We manage the carrier payments for all enrolled employees to make sure that this doesn't happen.
I managed to avoid an exempt plan when BCBS screwed up my auto-pay. Ironically, I did that by leveraging a mistake I made when I first signed up for an ACA plan: I'd mis-entered my kids information, which screwed up the registration, and when I called for support to fix the problem the Marketplace team just created a new registration for me. After BCBS screwed up, we were able to use the original stale registration to enroll in a new plan. I got pretty lucky: the exempt plans retain the ability to DQ applicants for preexisting conditions, and while my family is healthy, my daughter had an unexplained seizure when she was 4 and is, for all intents and purposes, excluded from exempt plans.
The thing I think people don't know and really need to understand is that if you let your health insurance lapse, you can't simply pay up to reinstate it; you can only alter your insurance during qualifying events. That's because if you could lapse and then pay up later, lots of people would exploit that to avoid paying for insurance until they needed it, which defeats the purpose of insurance.
None of this has anything to do with your startup, of course.
