Although most Republicans are conceding that the problems with HealthCare.gov are receding months after its abysmal launch, there still remain daunting challenges for those charged with getting as many Americans as possible signed onto the Affordable Care Act before the Dec. 23 deadline — just 13 days away — to get insurance coverage for 2014.
Today in Pinellas Park a group of local citizens who have a strong interest in making it as easy as possible for people to sign up for the ACA gathered for a roundtable discussion with Sol Ross, Director of Business Outreach for the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington. Many of those in attendance were volunteers working for either Enroll America, the group leading efforts to enroll Americans in ObamaCare, or with Organizing for Action, the grassroots organization advocating in support of President Obama’s agenda.
Shortly after Ross’s sunny proclamation that things on the website “Get better everyday,” he was brought down a notch after Carmen Schumacher with Organizing for Action told the group that people going on the site still don’t know how to use it, or they get so frustrated in trying to navigate it they end up trashing it publicly, which is what she was subjected to from a local pizza joint owner on Monday night.
“She said she had been on there for two hours, and it really bothered her,” Schumacher told the group.
Alex Ramirez with Enroll America said her biggest issue was with educating the public. “A lot of them have so many questions that I can’t answer unfortunately.”
Ross said that there would be more navigators coming online soon. Those are the the counselors trained to help the uninsured. He also said there was a cultural problem because many people in underserved communities have no history of signing up for healthcare, and thus were more resistant to signing up for a plan. He said that the Department of Education is working on informing school children about the plan and having them talk to their parents about it. He added that the insurance companies would soon start hitting the television airwaves as well to support enrollment.
Shannon Almadrones is a field organizer for Enroll America in Pinellas County. She said her biggest problem was trying to drive uninsured people who had such a horrific initial experience with HealthCare.gov to go back to the website.
Ross said that was a particular vexing challenge, saying if a consumer looking to buy toys for someone for Christmas has an issue with a website they can quickly go onto another site to find the same product. But that obviously isn’t the case with HealthCare.gov, the only game in town when it comes to signing up for the government run health exchanges.
Ross said he was also open to hearing suggestions from those out in the field on how the feds could make the signup easier.
Larry Floriani, with the group Doctors For America, complained that there have been so many changes to the law that it’s been hard to keep up when trying to inform the public about the plan. He said there was confusion in the business community about the law, and asked Ross directly what parts of it were in effect currently.
Mary White with Organizing for Action said her dilemma is that the people who show up for informational sessions are often over 60 and thus not the key demographic that organizers want to enroll (those would be citizens between 18 and 35, the so-called “young invincibles.”)
Ross and many of the participants bemoaned the fact that Florida did not accept the federal government’s plan to expand Medicaid in the state, shutting out hundreds of thousands of potential ACA consumers. Although they talked about how the business community is still trying to challenge the Legislature into accepting the money, the fact of the matter is House Speaker Will Weatherford recently said that he still has no intention of doing so.
The Wesley Chapel based legislator wrote sarcastically in an op-ed that “We didn’t fall for the Washington promise that, ‘If you like your Medicaid funding, you can keep your Medicaid funding.'”
This article appears in Dec 5-11, 2013.
