Libbi Stovall couldn’t believe it last month when she looked at the fine print in her company’s 2016 health plan, which supposedly meets the strictest standard for employer obligations under Affordable Care Act rules.

The insurance paid for inpatient hospital care, office visits and diagnostic imaging. But it provided no coverage for outpatient surgery, which accounts for two out of every three operations in the nation, according to hospital industry data.

“I knew their policy would not give my family the coverage we need,” said Stovall, 52, who lives in Carrollton, Tex., and has a history of back problems, including outpatient surgery in 2014 to remove a cyst. Her doctor, she added, said that “I absolutely have to be on an insurance plan that covers both outpatient and inpatient hospitalization.”

Worse for her, being offered such a plan through her workplace, an international staffing firm called Open Systems Technologies, barred Stovall from federal subsidies to buy more comprehensive coverage in online insurance marketplaces.

Her experience illustrates the latest chapter in the story of employers and insurance designers pushing the limits of the Affordable Care Act.

Last year regulators blocked companies with millions of lower-wage workers from claiming that coverage with no inpatient hospital benefits met the Affordable Care Act’s strictest standard for large employers.

Now that those “skinny plans” aren’t allowed, insurance administrators and many cost-conscious employers are purporting to meet the rules with a new version that excludes another major category: outpatient surgery. The new plans may not survive regulatory scrutiny any more than the old ones did, some experts say.

“I really wonder whether they can do that,” said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia who is an authority on the health law. “Refusing to cover any outpatient physician surgical services is arguably a violation.”

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