The nation-wide GOP effort to keep people from getting access to health care is working too well. A Texas-based company that has worked for decades helping people enroll in Medicaid has
returned more than $800,000 in federal grants to hire and train navigators, people who will help the uninsured access health insurance under Obamacare.
According to an email obtained by The Associated Press, Cardon Outreach’s chief legal officer Charles Kable told the federal government it was returning more than $800,000 in federal grant money. The funds were supposed to be used to hire people in four states help explain the intricacies of health insurance to millions of people who aren’t covered.
While the email didn’t go into specifics, some have said those opposed to the health care law, mostly Republicans, are making it difficult for some of the navigator programs to get off the ground.
“The emerging state and federal regulatory scrutiny surrounding the Navigator program requires us to allocate resources which we cannot spare and will distract us from fulfilling our obligations to our clients,” the email said.
Cardon was contracted to conduct the outreach in Florida, Oklahoma, Utah, and Pennsylvania. Last week, Florida health officials ordered their county health departments to ban the navigators from local clinics, where uninsured people often seek treatment. In two more Republican states, Wisconsin and Indiana, the state is trying to deter people from seeking the navigator jobs by requiring that they pay for additional training or pay for their own background checks. And nationally, the Republican-led House Energy and Commerce Committee tried to gum up the works in the states that have the most uninsured residents by requiring organizations hiring navigators respond to a lengthy, intrusive set of questions.
All of this just to break Obamacare, which is to say all of this to keep more people from having access to health care.