“Every individual who might apply for or enroll in insurance on the individual market has available to him subsidies and also a vast array of choices,” Carney said at a briefing last week. “The basic level of insurance might have a higher deductible; a higher level of insurance might have a lower deductible, as is true today.”

Ariel Climer, 28, of Los Angeles, said she was hoping to afford health insurance for the first time since she graduated from college. While she’s found coverage options on California’s state exchange that fit her budget of $60 to $90 a month, the high annual deductibles have given her pause.

Juggling Jobs

Climer works part-time for the Los Angeles Unified School District, at a bicycle shop and as a freelance personal assistant. While she rarely goes to the doctor, she said she worries about how she’d afford her share of the bill if an accident landed her in the emergency room.

“It is a balance between picking something that is going to be cheaper and something that won’t have a huge deductible or cost too much down the road,” Climer said. Paying more to lower her deductible, “is just going to mean I have no money to save at the end of the month.”

Prior to Obamacare, $10,000 to $20,000 deductibles were common in the individual market, said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, who supports the act. Republicans now criticizing the law have long argued the health-care system would benefit from consumers having “more skin in the game,” he said.

“This is essentially Republican health policy, where you have higher cost sharing,” Jost said in an interview. “Now that it’s individuals who have actual bills they have to pay, it’s a problem.”

Online Markets

The insurance exchanges that opened Oct. 1 as part of the 2010 health law are run by the federal government in 36 U.S. states, with the 14 remaining states and Washington, D.C., operating their own marketplaces. They are open to people who don’t have coverage through work or a government program like Medicare or Medicaid.

In the first month of operation, 106,185 people enrolled in private insurance plans through the new marketplaces, with 369,261 more qualifying for the state-federal Medicaid program for the poor, the administration said on Nov. 13. The early sign-ups were less than anticipated as about 7 million people are projected to buy insurance on the exchanges for 2014, rising to 25 million by the end of the decade.