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Planned Parenthood of Northern New England trained seven existing employees as navigators and has hired and trained three new staff members, said Jennifer Frizzell, policy adviser for the organization. In the first week of enrollment, one navigator in Manchester had 45 appointments but she wasn’t able to enroll anyone online because of the glitches. Navigators are using paper applications, but are not telling people to submit them. Instead, they are using the papers and appointments to educate people about how health insurance works and the terms they will need to understand, such as premiums and copays, and how the tax...

Technical difficulties are still plaguing the federal website for health insurance sign up, but that hasn't stopped dozens of Charleston's homeless residents from signing up for health insurance over the last two weeks. The non-profit agency has a drop-in center for homeless people, some of whom live outside or in shelters. As trained community assisters, Herlihy and other Covenant House staffers were supposed to connect their clients to other helpers that were to actually lead people through the application process. But directing their clients, many of whom have mental illnesses, to other agencies would have been more difficult than leading...

A Kansas Obamacare “navigator” stormed the property of the Republican secretary of state earlier this year, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.“It is shocking that the Obama administration has hired as a navigator a person who has been caught trespassing and attempting to intimidate a public official,” Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach told TheDCNF.“This kind of thug activity is bad enough, but giving this person federal tax dollars is sickening,” he added.Under the Affordable Care Act, 105 organizations have received $67 million in federal to help guide Obamacare enrollees through the process of obtaining health insurance under the...

At last, Heidi Zoellner can smile. Zoellner, the lone Affordable Care Act navigator in central Nebraska, is seeing fewer glitches on www.healthcare.gov. Zoellner, 40, of Kearney has an office at Community Action Partnership of Mid-Nebraska. She took a week of online training to become a licensed certified navigator and passed online tests throughout the process. She has no data on how many Nebraskans have enrolled for health care insurance so far.

New concerns are being raised about so-called ObamaCare "navigators" following a string of reports about the questionable backgrounds of those selected to guide Americans through what is shaping up to be a rocky roll-out of the health care law. The concerns come on top of the drama over the HealthCare.gov site itself, which is the main federal hub for would-be participants and has been riddled with technical problems. The "navigators" are outreach workers, funded by federal taxpayer dollars, who are supposed to help people sign up for coverage. The Daily Caller reported earlier this week that one "enrollment assister" in...

OMAHA - Under ACA, navigators are intended to work with people one-on-one or in groups to educate them about the new law. The people – who spend about 20 hours in training—are provided at Community Action of Nebraska and the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. Both are networks of community action programs. Jan Henderson with the Fred LeRoy Health and Wellness Clinic said it hasn't been able to sign anyone up since the site launched two weeks ago. She added that it has made appointments with 15 people.

Corruption: The crash-prone government health-care site asks applicants if they want to register to vote as they try to sign up for ObamaCare. By sheer coincidence, a plurality of the uninsured are likely Democratic voters. Call it Motor Voter on steroids — the piggybacking of voter registration to an otherwise unrelated government function. Those trying to navigate Healthcare.gov, a website that looks and functions as if designed by the department of motor vehicles, are being asked if they want to register to vote just in time for crucial 2014 midterm elections that are likely to be a referendum on ObamaCare....

October 1st’s disastrous launch of the Affordable Care Act’s automated web site “is not any of my fault,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), architect of the law, insisted. The former Speaker rebuffed questions asking whether she has read the law since its 2010 enactment when she famously asserted that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” “If you look carefully at what I said you’ll see that I said we had to pass the law so you can find out what’s in it,” Pelosi pointed out. “This law isn’t for me....

A program intended to help educate uninsured people in Western Pennsylvania about Obamacare started sluggishly because “navigators” are not trained, and several positions remain vacant nearly two weeks after online insurance marketplaces went live. “This is a new program, and there are going to be some glitches,” said Larry Klinger, who oversees a navigator program at Allegheny Intermediate Unit, where two such workers are in place. “You work through the glitches, and you make the best you can.” The intermediate unit is one of several organizations statewide hiring and training navigators, a category of workers established under the federal Patient...

“The phones are ringing off the hook,” said Dizzy Warren, community outreach manager for Michigan Consumers Health Care. The health advocacy nonprofit received about $1.3 million in federal funding to do public outreach and enrollment for the Affordable Care Act statewide. But, Warren admits the system’s slow website has been a blockade for getting people enrolled. For some local navigators, there is a lack of demand. “It hasn’t been really demanding here at this point,” Jen Hansen, certified navigator based in Cadillac. “It think there is still a lot of confusion.”

The fate of the Affordable Care Act, notwithstanding obstructionism by the Republicans and the nine House Democrats, depends strongly on the success of efforts to get uninsured people to enroll for health insurance. First and foremost in making this happen are the navigators. There’s no reason to let the Obama administration off the hook for its own responsibility in making the work of the navigators tough, what with navigator grants that were announced only in August with training materials issued in September for the October 1st start-up of the exchanges, not to mention embarrassing computer glitches. Since the nonprofit sector...

Navigators who were hired to help people enroll in the new online health insurance marketplaces say they are hopeful the website will be running more smoothly in the next few days. Cathy Harding, executive director of the Kansas Association for the Medically Underserved, said that the website should have glitches worked out in the next several days. Harding’s group, which oversees about 80 of the state’s certified navigators through a federal grant, hasn’t heard of a single person who has been able to enroll using the online system. “Clearly everybody is a little frustrated,” Harding said. “People spent significant amounts...

St. Louis - News 4 is issuing a warning of possible scammers taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act involving the navigators who help people sign up for the health insurance exchange. Certified navigators are operating all over the state and officials warn the legit navigators will set up appointments and have strict rules for taking personal information. If you are doing it by yourself online, make sure the website ends with .GOV as scammers have set up false websites hoping to steal people’s information as well.

Growing concerns about identity theft and fraud have led the Illinois Department of Insurance to issue a public warning, just as the new health insurance exchanges enter their implementation phase. Concern focuses on those charged with assisting Illinoisans with enrollment to the new health insurance exchanges, the so-called “navigators.” Navigators will “educate consumers about the health insurance Marketplace, answer health coverage-related questions, and facilitate consumers’ selection of affordable health coverage through the Marketplace,” according to the navigator training manual. This will give navigators access to individuals’ personally identifiable information: the information necessary for identity theft. The Illinois Department of Insurance...

The man whose name is synonymous with computer security shreds Obamacare’s web strategy. The very worst kind of identity theft is medical identity theft, but when you also combine this with all sorts of additional...

When the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed, the Obama Administration envisioned that all states would implement the program as outlined in the law. However, unlike any federal program in recent history, 27 states have decided not to create a Health Insurance Exchange and instead let the federal government implement it at a cost in excess of $8 billion. This results in a “top down” payment system versus the “bottom up” approach the framers of the legislation expected. What this means is that some states will have federal marketplaces, and others will have their own locally developed marketplaces for employers...

Two Obamacare Navigator groups went door-to-door in Florida on Tuesday offering to help the uninsured determine the proper insurance plan despite past assurances that going door-to-door would be inappropriate, according to Fox News. Gary Cohen, director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, testified on Sept. 19 that going door-to-door would be inappropriate. “They are going to be instructed by us, as part of our agreement with them, not to go door-to-door and I am confident, congressman, that they will obey that instruction” Cohen said at the time.

The New York Times surveys the Obamacare roll-out in Florida, home to America’s second-highest uninsured population. This piece is extraordinary: MIAMI — The glitches in the new electronic health care sign-up system began almost immediately at the Jessie Trice Community Health Center, in one of this city’s poorest neighborhoods, and they never let up. With a potential applicant by her side, Linda J. Lott, a certified application counselor, stood at her computer terminal and typed the word “Florida” into the insurance exchange network Web site. “The system is down at the moment,” it read…All day, trained application counselors typed in...

Health Reform: Those icons of voter fraud have been tasked and paid to guide an unwilling public through the ObamaCare enrollment process — while getting access to confidential information on thousands of people seeking health insurance. Somehow it does not surprise us that among the conductors on the train wreck known as ObamaCare will be leftist agitators from President Obama's beloved Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. They'll get up to $48 an hour as "navigators" to lead us through the dead-end ObamaCare maze. As Mathew Vadum reports on the American Spectator blog, United Labor Unions (ULU)...

Welcome to ObamaWreck! Americans nationwide spent Tuesday struggling with the much-hyped "Affordable Care Act" health insurance exchanges. Server meltdowns, error messages and security glitches plagued the federal and state government websites as open enrollment began. But when taxpayers discover exactly who will be navigating them through the bureaucratic maze, they may be glad they didn't get through. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius controls a $54 million slush fund to hire thousands of "navigators," "in-person assisters" and counselors, who are now propagandizing and recruiting Obamacare recipients into the government-run exchanges. As I warned in May, the Nanny State...