Baton Rouge General Hosts Health Insurance Navigators

For the first time, Baton Rouge General Medical Center is hosting insurance navigators, trained to offer assistance to anyone who wants to buy health care coverage through the federal marketplace, which is now in its second year.

This was Kimberley Garner's first time applying for coverage under the Affordable Care Act. She's 52, currently unemployed, and wants to avoid the federal tax penalty that comes with not having insurance in 2015. For her, that would be about $325 she can’t spare.

"I was trying to get on the marketplace for insurance and could not get it done on my computer, so I needed help from the navigator to get the paperwork done," Garner said.

She went to Baton Rouge General and found Jacqueline Riley, an insurance navigator with the Capital Area Agency on Aging.

"Most of the clients that we've been getting, they've tried to do it on their own and got lost, and that's when they're coming in to us," Riley said. 

She's found most of her clients are facing one or the other of two big issues when it comes to getting coverage: either their employer doesn't offer health insurance, or their employment status has changed from full- to part-time.

Navigators are at Baton Rouge General every weekday from 9 a.m. in the morning until 9 p.m. in the evening. But Riley says even that’s not enough. The sign-up process takes awhile, and it can take even longer if a client forgets to bring all their paperwork.

"Even from the time frame we're here at the hospital, we still have to make appointments to come into our office to continue to help the clients that are coming in from the community," Riley said. 

As of January 9th, just over 126,000 people in Louisiana have signed up for coverage through Healthcare.gov, 24,000 more than last year.

That's helpful for Baton Rouge General, since back in August, the ER at the Mid City campus nearly closed, due to the strain of uninsured patients, for whose care the hospital only gets partial reimbursement from the government.

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