The Obama administration, aiming to encourage health insurance companies to offer child-only policies, said Wednesday that they could charge higher premiums for coverage of children with serious medical problems, if state law allowed it.

Earlier this year, major insurers, faced with an unprofitable business, stopped issuing new child-only policies. They said that the Obama administration’s interpretation of the new health care law would allow families to buy such coverage at the last minute, when children became ill and were headed to the hospital.

In September, the administration said that insurers could establish open-enrollment periods — for example, one month a year — during which they would accept all children.

Now, on Wednesday, the administration, answering a question raised by many insurers, said they could charge higher premiums to sick children outside the open-enrollment period, if state laws allowed such underwriting, as many do.

Insurers “can adjust their rates based on health status until 2014, to the extent state law allows,” said Jay Angoff, director of the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The difficulty in preserving access to child-only insurance policies is the latest example of unintended consequences of the new law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The problem may be solved in 2014. If Democrats can beat back Republican efforts to dismantle the law, most Americans will be required to carry health insurance, starting in 2014, and insurers will be required to accept all applicants, regardless of pre-existing conditions.

Have you checked out YWN Radio yet? Click HERE to listen!

(Read More: NY Times)