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The Obama administration said in April it was scaling back the complexity of the small-business marketplace by delaying by one year a feature to allow employees of such businesses to pick from a range of plans, instead of the company selecting one on workers' behalf.

Business owners will be allowed to submit a paper application using a PDF form starting Tuesday, but they won't be able to complete an electronic application until a few weeks later, the official said. A call center for businesses will open Tuesday for employers who want help completing the paper application.

Mr. Mead cited a report by the Institute of Medicine that tallied more than $760 billion in health care “waste” created annually as a result of consumer fraud, unnecessary procedures and excessive administrative costs.

r. Mead said the campaign also stressed the need for health care providers to shift to a model known as “accountable care,” which shifts their reimbursement models for health care professionals from being paid for the volume of services they perform to being paid based on the outcomes of patient care. Accountable care systems are usually linked to technologies that help health care providers measure performance and manage patient data. Aetna has 27 accountable health care agreements with hospitals and other health care providers around the country.

Bertolini said in the video. “If we fix just 20 percent of it, we could pay for the Affordable Care Act. We could insure everyone without increasing taxes.”

But insurers underestimated how fast medical costs would rise, and how many seniors would actually use the benefits. And they underpriced the insurance premiums. Making matters worse, some insurers that were "hungry for market share" charged too little at first and planned to increase premiums later, says Joseph M. Belth, editor of the Insurance Forum newsletter and professor emeritus of insurance at Indiana University.

Ryan White, a hospital consultant with Eide Bailly LLP, said one concern is that more people who buy private insurance, including through the online exchanges being set up by the federal government and some states, could opt for plans with high deductibles. He said the lowest-cost plans offered through the exchanges could have deductibles as high as $7,000. That creates a problem if they get sick.“A lot of the individuals signing up for those plans probably don’t have $7,000 sitting in a bank account to pay general hospital of Milwaukee,” White said.

Operators of employer health-insurance marketplaces say many workers pick cheaper coverage than they previously had and that is one way the exchange approach can save money.

In an exchange run by Liazon Corp. that has around 60,000 people enrolled, about 75% of the workers have chosen less-expensive plans, accepting bigger deductibles and other out-of-pocket charges, as well as smaller choices of health-care providers and restrictions such as primary-care gatekeepers. "They want value for their money," said Alan Cohen, Liazon's chief strategy officer.

Accenture ACN +0.08% PLC projects that around a million Americans will get employer health coverage through such marketplaces next year, and the number will increase to 40 million by 2018.

A poll released this week by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that 51% of Americans say they don't understand how the health law affects them. More Americans disapprove of the law—42% to 37%—than favor it, according to the poll.