FIRST WAY MEANS:

About 1.2 million people who bought coverage on HealthCare.gov in 2014 dropped their health plan and picked a new one through the site for 2015, the Obama administration said Wednesday.

The extent of people's willingness to consider shifting to a different insurance carrier came as a surprise to federal officials, said Andy Slavitt, a former top executive at UnitedHealth Group who is now principal deputy administrator at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and will become acting administrator on Monday.

"This is a much more active consumer than anybody expected," Mr. Slavitt said, noting that in other programs such as the federal employees' health plan, or Medicare prescription drug benefits, as few as 10% of customers changed plans from year to year. "We wanted to create maximum choice while we had maximum consumer protection," he said.

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