Now we must staff the bureaucracy required to run Obamacare. This may at least put a dent in unemployment, but at untold costs, not just to the federal government but to states and insurance companies. For example, the law requires the hiring of thousands of “navigators,” whose purpose is to help people pick out an insurance company.
From the Washington Post:
Signing up an estimated 30 million uninsured Americans for coverage under the health-care law is shaping up to be, if not a bureaucratic nightmare, at the very least a daunting task.
While some people will find registering for health insurance as easy as booking a flight online, vast numbers who are confused by the myriad choices will need to sit down with someone who can walk them through the process.
Enter the “navigators,” an enormous new workforce of helpers required under the law. In large measure, the success of the law and its overriding aim of making sure that virtually all Americans have health insurance depends on these people. But the challenge of hiring and paying for a new class of workers is immense and is one of the most pressing issues as the Obama administration and state governments implement the law.
Tens of thousands of workers will be needed — California alone plans to certify 21,000 helpers — with the tab likely to run in the hundreds of millions of dollars. . . .
Over the short term, some workers may be funded by federal grants, state budgets or private money. But over the longer term, most of the costs are to be covered by the new health-care marketplaces, called “exchanges,” being set up in every state. The money will come from fees that insurers will pay to sell their plans on the exchanges. . . .
Under the law, the exchanges must fund enough navigators to ensure that every applicant who needs assistance can get it.
“You have to ask, how many people can one navigator help in one day?” de Percin said. “Well, the people who do this kind of work might spend an hour to three hours with folks. So the answer is not many.”
via For insurance exchanges, states need ‘navigators’ — and hiring them is a huge task – The Washington Post.
Again, I ask, How can Obamacare possibly work? And let me ask a new question: If the federal government is going to take over the medical industry, wouldn’t it be better to just have a government-run healthcare system like Canada and England do, rather than this jury-rigged, Rube-Goldberg, bound-to-be-inefficient system that pretends to use private insurance companies while actually taking them over?
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