While online health insurance exchanges mandated by the Affordable Care Act are supposed to make the process of shopping for health coverage easier, plenty of people are apprehensive about the idea of not being able to talk to a person, Kaiser Health News and Minnesota Public Radio report. "Not everybody is going to be able to independently hop on an online program," Joan Cleary, head of the Minnesota Community Health Worker Alliance, said, according to the article. "Some people are going to need these warm connections."
For those instances, the health law also calls for human helpers dubbed "navigators" to guide the insurance buying process. However, the complexity and variety of government and commercial plansmeans such helpers would have to do much more than simply steering consumers toward one plan or another. Article