Volunteers will fan
out across Florida today, knocking on doors to identify uninsured residents and
get them ready to enroll in Obamacare.
But they won’t be knocking blindly.
Behind the scenes is a sophisticated data operation that will guide
volunteers to the right neighborhoods in Palm Beach County and elsewhere, and
hopefully, even the right door to find those who can benefit from the law.
A team of data experts
at Enroll America in Washington has built a model designed to identify not just
who has no insurance but who may be persuaded to buy it. The canvassing and outreach effort has the
potential to become among the most significant since the presidential election.
The organization’s
data director is an alumnus from the renowned Obama re-election cave. Programmers, analysts and others worked
16-hour days there developing a model, for example, that showed the campaign
could win in Florida, despite conventional wisdom that it would swing to Mitt
Romney.
As in political
campaigning, turnout is crucial to the success of the Affordable Care Act. If people do not enroll in health insurance,
the law will fail both politically and economically.
If the only people
drawn to buy insurance are those who truly need it, people who are sick or
older but not old enough for Medicare, the cost of insurance could be driven up
for everyone.
Targeting the 49
million uninsured in a country of nearly 314 million is only a little easier
than finding a proverbial needle in a haystack.
That is – without the use of data.
Data director Matthew
Saniie used census data, Enroll America’s own survey of 10,000 consumers and
databases on the market, likely to include voter data.
The numbers have given
his team some helpful indicators.
Two-thirds of uninsured American live in 13 states. Florida has about 4 million residents with no
health coverage.
Those oldest and most
well-to-do are more likely to have insurance.
Categories of those least likely to be insured included singles,
Latinos, the young and the poor.
Data that are publicly
available or that can be bought is only the first step. The campaign also relies on results from its
own survey. Callers used landlines and
cellphones to interview 10,000 residents in English and Spanish.
Face-to-face
interactions between volunteers and the public will provide some of the most
useful data to focus the outreach efforts.
“When people volunteer
information to us, we record it and ultimately track it,” Saniie said. “No longer are we making decisions based on a
model, but now we can base decisions on conversations we’ve had with thousands
of people.”
Real time data input
was one of the keys to Obama’s success in 2012, said Soren Dayton, senior vice
president at Prism Public Affairs.
Dayton worked on messaging and voter contact for John McCain’s 2008
campaign.
“The hardest parts of
this aren’t mathematical,” he said. “The
most remarkable thing about the Obama campaign wasn’t the data – although the
data were really cool – it’s their ability to, one, trust their volunteers,
and, two, create a cultural system among their staff that works.”
More than a dozen
volunteers in Palm Beach County participating in Weekend of Action will visit
communities today in Delray Beach and Boca Raton. If they meet someone who has insurance,
they’ll ask about friends or family members who don’t.
And when the person
who answers their knock says they don’t have insurance, the volunteers will
collect as much information as they can.
Is the person interested in insurance?
How much money do they earn? That
will help Enroll America determine whether they may qualify for a government
subsidy to help buy a plan. Potential
enrollees will be added to lists to be called or visited again. Maybe again and again. After the federal government announces its
grants for navigators, the people who will actually help consumers sign up,
Enroll America will connect its contacts with navigators.
As a fiend organizer
is Palm Beach County, Florence French has already started knocking. She gets a list, which includes the likely
names of the people who live there, their address and phone number.
Advocates of the law
are up against a growing negative perception of it. A new CBS poll found that a record 36 percent
of Americans want to the law repealed, and 54 percent have an unfavorable
opinion of it.
Enroll America’s own
data show that their target audience is hardly primed to receive the
message. Of those Americans who may be
eligible to enroll in insurance come October through an online marketplace
operating in each state, 78 percent don’t know about it.
French is finding that
in her early conversations.
“Most people didn’t
even understand that the Affordable Care Act has been passed, [number] 1 [and]
[number] 2, they really didn’t understand what that meant,” she said.
One of French’s
biggest jobs is recruiting volunteers.
The group’s efforts in Palm Beach County this weekend will primarily
focus on Boca, which isn’t the most intuitive pick when one’s goal is finding
uninsured.
The town does have
more than 10,700 residents without insurance. According to census data.
Boca was where they
had a volunteer network, French said.
The organization will continue to recruit volunteers and take its door
knocking to other parts of the country, its spokeswoman said.
French is prepared to
knock on lots of doors and to keep coming back.
“Once we know that
they’re uninsured,” we know that our job’s done,” she said.
“Data mine helps
target health care enrollees” by Laura Green, The Palm Beach Post, Saturday, July 27, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment