Health Insurance Marketplace
Categories: Insurance
It's literally a marketplace for health insurance.
Imagine a shopping mall. But instead of Piercing Pagodas and massage chairs, the items getting hawked consist of health insurance policies. In this case though, the shopping gets done online, so you don't have to push past seniors in walkers getting their steps in.
In 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare), an attempt to overhaul the U.S. health insurance sector. The law included a mandate that required people to have health insurance, or face certain tax penalties.
In order to help people meet this requirement, marketplaces were set up that gave individuals and businesses the opportunity to compare various policies and pick the right ones for them. These represented a proliferation of health insurance marketplaces.