Lloyd Lofthouse

It’s hard to explain a new field of work to the public: you get a lot of “what is that?” “what do you do?” “is that even a job?”Assisters are a brand new position for most institutions like mine. To add to the confusion, they can be called several things: in person counselors, certified application counselors, navigators. All of these are just super fancy names for the role of guiding the community through the terrain of the Affordable Care Act.

The job is not your typical 9-5: weekend and nights are tacitly mandatory. Unless your organizations have a lot of man power and money–PrimeCare is not in this boat– the job is not just strictly enrollment and education. Assisters are master jugglers, balancing phone calls to answer questions, appointment setting, case follow-up, one on one and family appointments, administrative paper work. If you’re my team, add the difficulty of doing…