With a potential U.S. Supreme Court ruling expected at the earliest in the summer of 2012 and the Obama administration's desire to keep implementing the PPACA, uncertainty remains about what will happen to limited medical plans on Jan. 1, 2014.

If nothing changes, the "grandfathered" plans and those which received annual limits waivers will be taken off the market. Unless the Supreme Court overturns the entire Act, the options for hourly and part-time workers will look much different in the very near future.

So, what options exist for brokers and their clients? A very common approach has been to "wait and see" what happens. These employers have kept their current plans, preserved their grandfathered status and are waiting to see what the next move will be. Who would have predicted that HHS would scale back the PPACA's implementation so that three million limited medical plan participants could keep their coverage? Some experts have suggested the high number of union plans that utilized this form of coverage helped the administration make this tough decision that consumer advocates and some U.S. senators saw as counterproductive.