Nonprofit Navigators are Heroes and Heroines of Healthcare Reform

By Rick Cohen

          From The Nonprofit Quarterly

Regardless of one’s feelings about the Affordable Care Act, it is difficult to not admire the efforts of the nonprofit navigators who have been helping people sign up for health insurance on the exchanges. The navigators’ jobs were hardly easy, hampered by exchange websites ridden with “glitches,” to use the term of the moment, if not actually seriously and fundamentally flawed. Navigators were launched by the federal government way too late in the ACA timetable and given inadequate time to prepare and train, but they have generally persevered in their mission. As they struggled to help people sign up for insurance, they have found themselves under attack by state legislators and members of Congress eager to find ways to hinder and limit their activities.

The navigators are a stunning example of what it means to be a nonprofit: helping disadvantaged people access the resources and support they need and deserve and, in the process, making government programs actually work despite being riddled with elements that look virtually designed to make them all but dysfunctional.

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