In a December 15th op-ed in The Dallas Morning News, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Representative Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) hearing on Obamacare Navigators is designed to “intimidate” them and “impugn” their reputations.
According to Sebelius, the Obamacare website — HealthCare.gov — is now working and was “visited 5 million times” in the first week of December alone. However, “many prefer to meet with someone face to face in their own community who can answer their questions and lend a helping hand.” She says, “That’s where navigators and other trained assisters come in.”
She intimated that Issa’s hearing on navigators is an attempt to do what he and other “opponents of…[Obamacare] could not do legislatively, at the ballot box, or even by shutting down the federal government.”
In November, Obamacare Navigators in Dallas were caught on tape encouraging people to give false information on sign-up forms to get cheaper policies. KeyeTV of Austin, Texas, aired a video showing navigators “encouraging people to lie to get better [healthcare] rates.”
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