How States Actively Prevent People From Learning About Healthcare Plans /Restricting the Navigators
In Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, and Tennessee, for example, health navigators are not allowed to give advice about the benefits of enrolling in Obamacare.
6
inShar
Commonwealth Fund
To help the 16 million uninsured Americans learn about their options and sign up for coverage, the Affordable Care Act established grants to be doled out to people called “navigators,” who can be anyone from individuals to trade associations to consumer groups.
In Kentucky, for example, navigators called “Kynectors” hang out at clinics and community sign-up events, fielding questions about, say, plans that are best for someone with multiple sclerosis, or how to deal with a moral aversion to Medicaid (when you qualify for Medicaid).
This kind of in-person help seems to be one of the few functional options left, since the launch of the federal website Healthcare.gov has been a disaster, and even attempting to calculate the subsidies one might qualify for can be a harrowing task, as my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta reported.
Four states bar navigators from giving advice about the benefits, terms, and features of a particular health plan.
John McDonough, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who helped in the implementation Massachusetts' 2006 health-reform law, on which Obamacare was partly based, said that the state’s own experience showed the importance of in-person assistance. McDonough told me that while there was a slow trickle of sign-ups through the state’s website (granted, it was seven years ago), far more new enrollees were helped along by healthcare providers and social workers.
“Most people signed up through hospitals and community health centers when they showed up for care in person,” he said. “They were assisted by hospital personnel. The voluntary individual enrollments went much pokier.
“There are people with literacy challenges, people who are intimidated by the process,” he said. “That's why the navigators [for Obamacare] are considered to be so important.”
States that resisted Obamacare in the first place seem to be, unsurprisingly, the same ones that are wary of the navigators. Florida banned navigators from working in county health departments. Texas Governor Rick Perry wanted navigators to be fingerprinted, pay a state licensing fee, and take an extra 40 hours of coursework on top of what federal law required.
The federal government awarded $67 million to more than 100 organizations to hire the navigators, but two groups, one in Ohio and one in West Virginia, turned down their federal grants last month, a move the Ohio group attributed specifically to that state’s restrictions on navigators. Ohio had no navigators available on the day the exchanges opened, October 1, because the state mandated that they get approval from the Ohio Department of Insurance before starting work.
MUCH MORE AT:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-states-actively-prevent-people-from-learning-about-healthcare-plans/281227/
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