How dastardly.
Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgeons recently bragged about "doing everything in our power to be an obstructionist" in the implementation of Obamacrap.
Hudgens went on to give an example of that obstructionist behavior, this one involving so-called “navigators” who are being hired to guide customers through the process of buying health insurance on marketplaces, or exchanges, set up under the federal program.
“We have passed a law that says that a navigator, which is a position in that exchange, has to be licensed by our Department of Insurance,” Hudgens said. “The ObamaCare law says that we cannot require them to be an insurance agent, so we said fine, we’ll just require them to be a licensed navigator. So we’re going to make up the test, and basically you take the insurance agent test, you erase the name, you write ‘navigator test’ on it.”
Think about this for a moment.
Navigators will have minimal training (40 hours in the class room) and following that will be required to take a proficiency exam.
Navigators are charged with collecting Social Security numbers, personal information, income and tax information as part of the financial colonoscopy to determine if you qualify for a taxpayer funded subsidy. That process is estimated to take up to 45 minutes and can involved a 26 page application.
Next the navigators are expected to explain your health insurance options, including drug formulary's and PPO networks.
With that kind of responsibility, I would hope they would have more knowledge about the process than someone in the Hi-Fi department at WalMart.
why would you take pride in making it harder for Georgians with pre-existing conditions to get the insurance coverage that had previously been denied to them, and that might save them from potential bankruptcy or even death? Why would you block the federal government from offering Medicaid coverage to more than 600,000 lower-income Georgia citizens, coverage that would allow them to compensate hospitals and doctors now forced to treat them for free? Why refuse to educate uninsured Georgians on the fact that they will soon be eligible for subsidies to help them pay for health insurance, as other states are doing?
That's a lot of "why's" Bookman.
Let's take this one at a time. I will go slowly and maybe you can follow.
MOST people had access to health insurance before Obamacrap. They could obtain coverage through their job, COBRA and the state assignment system after COBRA expired.
And almost everyone could qualify for individual health insurance unless they waited until their health changed and tried to buy it.
As for your Medicaid expansion argument, in case you have not noticed, we are in a recession. Not a recovery, a recession that has gone on longer than it should have if Washington hadn't bungled everything.
Medicaid expansion in Georgia would have cost the state an estimated $4 billion over the next 10 years. That's $4 billion the state does not have and unlike DC, we can't print money or borrow from the Chinese.
Your last observation is pure lunacy.
The state is not refusing to educate people on Obamacrap. Rather, the insurance commissioner is trying to make sure the navigators have at least minimal proficiency in this 2300 page train wreck.
When you consider the folks who work at H & R Block have 2 months of training and 85% of the returns they prepare are less than 4 pages I think expecting a navigator to have 40 hours of classroom instruction and passing a proficiency exam isn't too much to ask.
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