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No takers yet of Fund proposals
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Posted on Nov 24 2005
The NMI Retirement Fund board received no proposals for two urgent requests: a third party administrator and prescription drug benefit management services.
Fund board chair Joseph Reyes said this week that Request for Proposals for the two services have had no takers.
“There’s no submission,” said Reyes. “We have yet to decide whether to extend the RFPs. The original deadline for submission was on Nov. 16.
The Fund issued an RFP for a three-year contract for prescription drug benefit management services.
Another RFP is for a third party administrator to provide professional medical claims processing, adjudication, claims review and case management services for health care services provided to program members.
The Fund’s current third party administrator, Hawaii Pacific Medical Referral, has until Dec. 31 to provide services to the Fund.
HPMR’s three-year contract with the Fund was terminated in July 2004 in view of the planned privatization of the group health insurance program.
But for lack of the government’s readiness to privatize the program, HPMR’s contract gets extended on a staggered basis.
As of now, government authorities believe that the privatization may no longer materialize due to high prices being presented by its lone privatization proposer.
The Fund said the negotiation with Select Care has ended.
The privatization committee’s report has yet to be officially released, but sources said that it would recommend not to accept the privatization proposal as presented.
Reyes said that among other reasons, the proposal was deemed unacceptable because the rates would tremendously go up by as much as 100 percent.
“The thing is, we are running out of time . We’ve got no takers yet for the RFPs and HPMR’s contract ends on Dec. 31,” said Reyes.
He said that if the Fund continues to get no offers from providers, it would be left with no option but handle the programs themselves.
“When that happens, there’s a lot of work to be done,” said Reyes.
The Fund has nearly 8,000 members, including some 2,000 retirees.
