Librarian foot soldiers enlisted to help with Obamacare enrollment

Anonymous says:

Are Libraries being asked to handle more than they can?
I wouldn’t have the foggiest clue as to how to tell people which insurance they need to sign up for. How much training are we going to be given on this? Because I can just tell you right now, the people who are signing up for insurance aren’t going to know what insurance they will need and will expect us to figure it out for them. Sorry, but considering how confusing health insurance is, I wouldn’t know where to tell them to begin. They have to price plans, figure out the best one for their circumstances, etc. How the heck am I supposed to know which health care plan would be best for someone else?

First they dump all the tax forms on us and expect us to answer tax questions, then the state Labor Departments tell people registering for unemployment that the libraries will help them with their applications, then all the companies now have online-only job applications and we spend 75% of our time helping patrons fill out complicated job applications, now we are expected to be health-care experts as well. Adding to the fact that the GED will be online-only starting next year and I think this is going to overwhelm already cash-and-staff-strapped libraries.

I know the library is adapting and we all need to evolve, especially since helping and advancing the community is a good chunk of our job, but I think we being asked to handle way much more than we can chew. I work in a very busy medium-sized library and I don’t know if we are going to have enough staff to handle all these additional requests. Not to mention not having the budget to hire more full-time librarians.

Maybe if we had more staff or specialists it would be okay, but my library is not the NYPL or the Chicago Public Library or other big cities, which have vast resources and huge staff.