Bill eyed to provide coverage for retirees without insurance

NMI Retirement Fund board came in full force yesterday at the Senate, which is planning to introduce a new bill to help retirees without health coverage to avail one under the Fund’s insurer Aetna Global.

Senate President Paul A. Manglona (R-Rota) said the proposed bill hopes to do two things: first, to try to keep government employees enrolled so they will have lower premiums; and second, to allow for retires without insurance to be covered under the Fund.

Fund board chair Sixto Igisomar said the bill would benefit retirees without coverage and active members alike.

“There’s a government plan and the government plan involves active members and retirees. But there are private insurance companies out there that provide coverage to active government employees also but when they get old and getting ready to retire they drop them,” said Igisomar who said although he has no proof this happens, he nonetheless has heard a lot of stories about it that has compelled him to support the proposed bill.

Manglona said the proposed measure will try to entice active members to stay with the government insurance program by letting them know that they still can avail of the same insurance policy when they retire.

“So in other words, if you’re enrolled with the Fund and you retire you can [still] enroll with them. It is to encourage active members to stay in the policy, don’t ever quit even though you retire, don’t quit because you cannot come back in,” he said.

For retirees out of coverage, Manglona said the proposed bill gives them an opportunity to come into the system “but you have to pay 100 percent instead of 50 percent. Because now they cannot go to private insurers even if they want to because they’re old. Nobody wants to cover a sick person, right?”

The Senate president, however, doesn’t want to assign blame for this alleged practice of private insurance companies. “What the private insurers are saying is that we want to cover young people so we could offer these people cheap premium. But if you force us to cover everyone, then we would have to increase our premiums.”

Manglona said if the Legislature doesn’t deal with the issue of uninsured retirees now, the problem will boomerang back to the government sometime in the future.

“It will be a government burden down the road if we don’t work on having retirees get enrolled in government insurance,” he said, adding that he expects Sen. Pete Reyes (Ind-Saipan) to introduce the bill as soon as next week.

For Igisomar, the proposed measure is an issue of providing insurance to senior citizens that were never covered in the past.

“Private insurance company premiums are very low so how come these retirees are knocking on the Fund’s door and saying they need insurance when it’s as much as $300. So, something is going on. I don’t know but something is happening that people are covered but when they hit a certain age they get dropped. So they’re out of coverage. [So this becomes a question of] how can we help retirees that have no insurance but would like to have one,” he said.