“We are moving forward by matching funding to performance,” one official said. Another official added that last year, navigator groups enrolled about 80,000 people — less than half of what the groups aspired to, and only 0.7 percent of overall enrollees for 2017 — in marketplace plans. Some groups, they said, enrolled only a handful of people. But the figures they cited appeared not to include people who met with navigators to sort through coverage options but enrolled later on their own — a not insignificant group, according to past surveys on enrollment. Navigators defended their work. Alisha Keezer, a health care navigator at the Maine Lobstermen’s Association in Kennebunk, said the cutbacks were “shocking to all of us.” “We had no forewarning,” Ms. Keezer said. “This is heartbreaking. Here in Maine, we have helped many fishermen enroll in coverage — self-employed people who have never had health insurance before.” The navigator groups whose funding may be cut are only in the 38 states that rely on the federal Affordable Care Act marketplace, HealthCare.gov. Twelve other states run their own marketplaces and fund their own enrollment programs. “It’s very disappointing that the administration is minimizing the importance of in-person assistance to millions of people who have relied on it to understand how to enroll and how to use their insurance,” said Shelli D. Quenga, the program director at the Palmetto Project in South Carolina, a nonprofit group that received about $1 million to help with outreach and enrollment in the last 12 months. “These are not easy discussions for people who may have been uninsured all their lives.” Ms. Quenga said it was not true that most eligible people now know about the coverage available under the Affordable Care Act. “It’s ludicrous to believe that everyone now knows that the Affordable Care Act is alive and well and open for enrollment,” Ms. Quenga said. “Many people believe that the law is dead, or will be dead, based on the administration’s claims.”
The Trump administration is slashing spending on advertising and fees for enrollment under the Health Care Act , a move some critics charged was a blatant attempt to weaken the program .