CHCC: No insurance carrier filed policy for NMI in 2014

The Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. disclosed that no insurance carrier filed a policy with the Department of Commerce for 2014, which could only mean that a similar or higher volume of patients will avail of the government’s Medicaid program. That could be a problem as Medicaid faces limited funding after 2019 when Obamacare funds stop flowing to the CNMI.

CHCC board trustee Phillip Mendiola-Long is wary of the grave impact this would have on the islands’ sole public hospital, where the bulk of Medicaid patients seek treatment and other medical services.

Since the implementation in March 2010 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare or Affordable Care Act, the CNMI—along with other states and territories—was able to expand its Medicaid program as a result of the additional funding provided by the law during the transition period.

Corporation CEO Esther Muña told the board that the only reason why the hospital is getting a big chunk of Medicaid money right now is because of these added funds under Obamacare. She cautioned the board, however, that come 2019, CHCC will go back to getting limited funding from Medicaid because of the reinstatement of the cap, which is $6.5 million for the CNMI.

“At present, Medicaid regulations state that we have the cap, which is $6.5 million, and anything above that cap basically touch the ACA funding. That’s why ACA funding keeps reducing because they pay us $10 million in a year. The problem with this is: whether the funding [for ACA] is exhausted or not, we will go back to the cap in 2019,” Muña said Thursday.

She pointed out that this impact is vital to developing the corporation’s strategic plan.

“This is something we need to think about and plan because now it’s benefiting us, but how about after 2019?” Muña asked.

The ACA was enacted to insure all Americans and reduce the costs of healthcare, including regulating the premium rates of health insurance carriers.

According to Mendiola-Long, it’s the intention of ACA to get some higher income thresholder Medicaid recipients to transfer into a universal care pool, which the CNMI doesn’t have.

“We don’t have that pool here and the problem is, no insurance company wants to come to our area because the CNMI doesn’t have the amount of people necessary to make that universal healthcare coverage profitable for them to stay here. This is why nobody filed their policy this year [at Commerce],” said Mendiola-Long.

There are at least five major insurance carriers in the CNMI, all of which had cited concerns about the complex implementation of the federal health law in the Commonwealth.

And because the transition of Medicaid recipients to private insurance didn’t happen, Mendiola-Long fears that the Medicaid program will be the only one handling an increasing number of beneficiaries with lesser funding to operate.

Medicaid is a federal/state program that requires 55-45 matching funds. The program nearly had 16,000 clients last year. About four years ago it had about 10,000 clients.

Mendiola-Long cited as an example the entry of a new casino that may want to procure insurance for their employees but could not do so.

“Even if you want it, without a policy prior to 2014, you can’t get it and there’s no policy approved by Commerce right now,” he said.