President Barack Obama during a meeting in the Oval Office on March 3, 2014. Getty Images

The Obama administration will let people with health insurance plans that don't comply with Affordable Care Act standards keep them through October 2017 if their states allow it, officials said Wednesday in announcing a series of final Obamacare rules. The administration also extended Obamacare's open enrollment for next year by a month—it now will run from Nov. 15, 2014, until Feb. 15, 2015. And it is giving insurers additional financial help to offset the costs of benefits claims from new ACA enrollees, with the goal of keeping Obamacare premiums "affordable" in coming years, officials said. New rules also simplified the paperwork that larger employers will have to file when the the mandate obliging them to offer affordable health insurance to workers begins next year. And the rules gave a financial break to the types of self-insured health plans run by many unions, excluding them for two years from the $63-per-capita "reinsurance contribution" assessed for each enrollee. The final rules, which officials said are being announced now to give individuals, employers and insurers time to plan for 2015, come weeks before the March 31 deadline for open enrollment in Obamacare plans. So far, about 4 million people have bought private insurance plans sold on government-run exchanges and an unknown number have bought ACA-compliant plans outside the exchanges. Senior administration officials said there are up to 1.5 million people who now have health insurance through individual or small-group plans that aren't compliant with Obamacare minimum standards, and who are now potentially eligible for the extension announced Wednesday. (Read more: Oracle faces ouster from Oregon Obamacare website)

The fix lengthens an extension first announced in late 2013, in the midst of the troubled launch of Obamacare. At that time, the government had said that people who had bought noncompliant plans in 2013, would now be able to keep them through 2014. Without that step, the plans would have become illegal in 2014, but the severe tech problems of the federal Obamacare website and some state-run sites had made it effectively impossible for many people to shop for and buy insurance to replace their old plans. After the first extension was announced, about half of the states allowed their residents to keep noncompliant plans, which the administration had earlier blasted as "junk insurance" that did not protect many of their users from serious financial fallout from medical expenses. That tamped down, somewhat, outrage among critics who claimed President Barack Obama had lied while promoting his signature health-care reform law, when he had told people they could keep their insurance plans if they wanted under the ACA. But it also increased the risk that insurers selling new Obamacare plans would have fewer healthier enrollees to balance out the cost of giving benefits to sicker enrollees. Under the new rule, people who maintain those plans, and who renew them as late as Oct. 1, 2016, will be able to keep them until as late as 2017. The administration Wednesday emphasized that the extension now includes people in the small-group market, whose employers will start becoming subject to Obamacare's mandates in 2015. The administration said it would be up to individual states to allow the extension, and whether to include both individuals and small group members in the waiver or just one category. The extension could give political relief to Democrats, particularly in vulnerable legislative districts, who face criticism about the effects of Obamacare on their constituents. It also effectively delays until after the 2016 presidential election the requirement that nearly all Americans have health insurance that complies with ACA minimum standards. Most people who do not have health insurance by this year face a tax penalty in 2015 equal to up to 1 percent of their adjusted gross income. (Read more: As deadline nears, Obamacare fans hard to find )