Posted on 11/27/2018 2:03:19 PM PST by spintreebob
On a sunny, cold Sunday in November, Victoria Laverde walked up to an information table at Plaza Las Americas in Lilburn and asked for federal help in signing up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. It’s exactly what officials under the Trump administration hoped would happen when they made big changes to funding for ACA navigation. The government has made news as it stripped down the grant money, reducing Georgia’s enrollment navigator funding to $499,995, down from $1.4 million last year and $3.7 million in 2016. It’s virtually eliminated advertising, and it fired the major statewide nonprofits that used to be navigators. But with the remaining money, it made a bold choice.
Now, under the blessing of the Trump administration, Georgia’s navigator is a group that focuses on immigrants, and strongly on the Latino population. The administration has now directed navigators to target populations “left behind” by previous marketing for the the ACA, also known as Obamacare. Hispanics, who make up 9.6 percent of Georgia’s population, remain the least-insured major American ethnic group. And Latinos in Georgia, according to 2016 U.S. Census Bureau figures, are more likely to be uninsured than they are in any other state. Georgia Refugee Health and Mental Health, the new and only statewide navigator, has long been an ACA navigator organization in the past, but never with this much money or this much focus on the Hispanic population. This year’s grant more than triples what the federal government budgeted for the group last year. It exceeds by more than $100,000 any grant it ever received for navigation, even in the flush Obama years. In addition to its focus, Georgia Refugee Health and Mental Health is expected to do the job previous navigators did with the entire state population he director in charge of the group says the strategy is working.
“People are making appointments both in English and in Spanish and wanting information,” said Kathleen Connors, the director of GRHMH and its new navigator arms, ObamacareParaLatinos.org and HealthCareGA.org.
“I had wanted to move into the Hispanic community,” she said on the day she first learned her organization was awarded the grant. “Millions of dollars have been spent in the state of Georgia. The people who were supposedly doing it weren’t making a dent.”
Whether the Latino population here was really “left behind” may depend on perspective. The rate of uninsured Hispanic people in Georgia is still very high, at 27 percent as of 2016. But that’s down from 44 percent in 2013, the year the ACA kicked in, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“I don’t know what the term ‘left behind’ means,” said Samantha Artiga, a researcher on Latino enrollment at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Across the nation, “the uninsured rate for Hispanics significantly dropped,” she said. But, she added, they were starting from a significantly higher uninsured rate, so they’re still left with a long ways to go.
To be sure, the problem is not eligibility. Of those uninsured Hispanics, nearly half are U.S.-born citizens. Many more are naturalized citizens or have met requirements through their residency.
Everyone who spoke for this story who has worked with the population said the reasons for the lag are many and strong.
“The people need to know what this insurance is about,” said Liseth Fernandez, a navigator at that information table at Plaza Las Americas. “Sometimes Latin people are behind because they don’t speak English. Or people may think it’s not true” — a scam — “or think it’s too expensive.”
Those are things navigation, especially in a person’s native language, can fix.
But another big reason, they said, was fear that an eligible person applying would lead to that person’s relatives being targeted in case they’re unauthorized immigrants. That’s not supposed to happen, by federal rules, officials said. But the current administration’s focus on immigration has raised fears even for citizens and those here legally, they said. That ramped up after the administration proposed an order penalizing immigrant applicants if they took federal benefits they shouldn’t.
“Even though there are policies in place” to prevent one family member’s insurance sign-up from being used to track down another, unauthorized family member, said the researcher, Artiga, “I think there’s just so much fear and uncertainty — and it’s really ramped up — that I think families are just really wary of participating.”
Fred Ammons, who heads Community Health Works, the parent organization of the previous statewide navigator in Georgia, Insure Georgia, said it had made an important dent in the Hispanic uninsured population before it lost the grant this year. But the population includes people with specific challenges for health insurance, such as people who migrate from state to state for farm work, which makes insurance enrollment a mess. He notes that “dreamers,” people who were brought illegally to the U.S. as children but were raised here, are not eligible for ACA coverage even if they pay full price without subsidies.
For Laverde, an office worker, that’s not a problem. The Marietta resident is a U.S. citizen who spent years in her family’s home country of Colombia and just returned here in July. She tried enrolling on the federal marketplace website, healthcare.gov, directly but found it “crazy” and confusing. She was relieved to find the navigators’ table because she’s uninsured right now and is glad it won’t stay that way.
“It’s horrible. It’s very scary,” she said. “I have a 12-year-old. It’s really, really weird that you don’t have protection just for emergencies.”
But Trump's admin could be described as not operating like a politician or ideologue, but like a business... cutting the virtue signalers who don't produce and looking for a group that does more than virtue signal.
If funding is needed just to “navigate” Obamacare then it’s way too complicated like most everything else government “helps” us with.
Why?
What did the Hispanics in GA do to have Obamacare foisted off on them? That’s cruel, unusual, and bigoted.
Many Hispanics are too proud to apply. It is associated with white European chauvinist colonialism.
The job of the navigator is to destroy that pride and make them dependent.
At the Catholic church I attended in IL, the pastor preached in Spanish that if parents did not sign up their kids (anchor babies mostly) for Kidcare (CHIPS) they were not good Catholics and were going to hell. The left wing deacons and sisters were stationed at each exit not letting anyone out of mass until they signed up.
The Hispanics did not sign up. They found ways to distract the “navigators” and sneak out of mass. The sisters had a government contract (no separation of church and state when it grows the state) with the Feds to sign up kids. The Cathoilic sisters totally failed, as did Jessee Jackson and rainbow-Push failed in the Black community.
When you read the leftist trade journals they are constantly whining that the Hispanics just won’t sign up. Of course, many do. But so many Hispanics are low income and qualify who don’t sign up. Oh the Horror!
Hispanics that avoid registering for health care are likely illegal and don’t want to put things in writing, such as their real name, real spouse, real address, or social security number.
GA ping list interested?
GA FReeper ping.
And ONLY in English...
I bet in China the Communist appointed Catholic priests won't have trouble making the masses sign up for any government program they want. :)
I left the United Methodist church when I learned our offerings were funding the abortion lobby -- even pushing for partial birth abortion and forcing Christian employers to pay for their employees abortions. When I confirmed my information was accurate (you can't believe everything on the internet) and tried in vain to reform it (even here in Alabama of all places!), I left and took my worship of Jesus, my many hours per week of volunteer time, and my donations to another church. I worship Jesus, not Moloch. I miss the kids I used to lead in children's church (they're now young adults), but I love the people I volunteer with now just as much.
IMHO, the Catholic Church is having similar issues. I don't blame the church for having a couple of rogue priests abusing kids -- every big organization has a couple of bad guys. I blame the leaders for only pretending to do something about it, even after the last time it became public knowledge a decade ago. Same with Pope Francis all but giving over the Chinese Catholic masses to the Communist devil.
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