By Louise Radnofsky The Obama administration said Friday it would let states decide whether to implement a key part of the health law's small-business exchanges next year, extending an earlier delay.The Department of Health and Human Services said in rules released Friday that it would be up to state insurance commissioners to decide whether employees at small businesses using the health-insurance exchanges could choose from a range of plans or be limited to just one selected by their employer. Insurance commissioners can opt to remove the employee-shopping feature for workers in 2015 if they can show it would be in the best interest of the insurance market in the state, the rules said.HHS had said a year ago that it was delaying the employee-shopping function for 2014 for all the states using the online exchange run by the federal government because the federal government needed "more time to prepare." Around Thanksgiving 2013, HHS delayed the exchange entirely. The federal government also announced Friday that it would require people who wanted to buy a particular type of insurance called "fixed indemnity plans" to demonstrate first that they also had traditional health-insurance coverage.Fixed indemnity plans typically pay a limited cash benefit, with no deductible, to people who are hospitalized or encounter other medical costs. But the federal government said it was concerned that people might confuse those plans with standard health-insurance plans, and that the fixed indemnity plans alone couldn't be considered to be coverage under the law's requirement for most people to have insurance or pay a penalty. Federal officials also set new requirements for consumer-assistance groups that help people sign up for coverage in the exchanges, saying the workers would have to be recertified every year and obtain authorization before accessing consumers' personal information. Insurers, too, were subject to new requirements that they quickly review requests from patients to cover a prescription drug not included in a plan. Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com