Even after a bumpy start last year, more than 150,000 Ohio residents got new health plans through the Affordable Care Act marketplace between October and May.
People signed up through local health centers, food banks, libraries and churches, or just went online at home. Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, the director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, said the challenges in the first year went beyond tricky paperwork.
"We were dealing with Ohioans who had never had access to private health insurance before, so a lot of it was really basic health insurance literacy," Hamler-Fugitt said.
The association just got a grant of more than $2 million for a second year of outreach and navigator training, and two other Ohio groups got smaller federal grants.
Hamler-Fugitt estimated they reached more than a million people last year with information about Obamacare -- and they hope to top that this year.
A new concern for the certified health navigators is how health insurance subsidies actually get reconciled when folks file taxes. Federal subsidies for the health plans are technically tax credits, so April will bring whole new piles of paperwork.
Open enrollment on the marketplace starts again Nov. 15.
