National Health Reform is Good For Massachusetts: Reaching Out

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with Health Care For All’s HelpLine: a free in-house resource, referral, and enrollment service available in four languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin, and English) for consumers. Counselors help consumers from all backgrounds get the information they need, providing a broad range of support from answering health reform questions to insurance application assistance over the phone. There are numerous other consumer assistance organizations around the state, helping consumers access and navigate the health care system. These organizations are geographically diverse, multi-lingual, and culturally competent. By providing a range of direct services, these organizations amass information from the ground that feeds directly into policy work, identifying such things as shortcomings in outreach, enrollment and redetermination processes.

National health reform will bring new funding to Massachusetts to support and expand this critical work of consumer engagement and patient navigation. The Senate bill provides grant funds for states to enhance services beyond enrollment to assistance in maintaining coverage. Consumer-based helplines provide real-time information about problems individuals have accessing the system, completing necessary enrollment procedures, or navigating other areas of health care implementation; the Senate bill contains requirements for data collection from consumer assistance offices to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to identify any problems with implementation. National health reform would also provide support for use of creative technology (like our HelpLine’s enrollment computer program) in providing assistance.

With additional resources, HCFA and many other organizations would be able to serve residents of the Commonwealth better – with reduced call response time, expanded language capacity and ability to reach hard-to-serve demographics, and improved databases to allow for more refined data analysis and reports.
-Lindsey Tucker