The NMI Retirement Fund Board of Trustees has approved the issuance of a Request for Proposal for the hiring of a consultant to work on the entry of health insurance carriers under a privatized Group Health and Life Insurance program.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe RFP will be out soon for the consultant to draft the RFP for health insurance carriers to partake in the process,\u201d said Fund board chair Joseph Reyes. <\/p>\n
He said the consultant is expected to provide a set of guidelines that health insurance carriers need to comply with to accommodate the needs of CNMI members. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe board has moved to privatize the program but the process really takes time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Right now, he said, the Fund is working on a transition program, which he admitted is not adequate yet.<\/p>\n
This is why the board opted to seek the contract extension of Hawaii Pacific Medical Referral up to December this year, he said. HPMR\u2019s contract expires on July 31. <\/p>\n
\u201cGovernment process takes time. We\u2019re very careful in doing things. There are procurement rules to follow, etc,\u201d said Reyes. <\/p>\n
The board recently decided to terminate its contract with HPMR, its third party administrator for the Fund\u2019s Group Health Insurance, as part of its goal to privatize the program.<\/p>\n
This followed a letter from Gov. Juan N. Babauta in March this year, pushing for the privatization of the health insurance program. The governor said he favors a private, cafeteria-style health insurance program for government employees and retirees.<\/p>\n
The governor\u2019s proposal allows subscribers to choose their health insurance providers.<\/p>\n
This happens when the government solicits bids from private health insurance providers, in which a group of three or more would be selected.<\/p>\n
The administration had hoped to have such conversion ready before the end of the HPMR contract in July. <\/p>\n
If that deadline is not met, the governor had suggested that the board take over the management of the government health insurance program \u201cwith your in-house resources for the relatively short period until the new system is fully operational.\u201d <\/p>\n
Right now, the Fund said that it is tapping an in-house team, but it also needs to temporarily retain the services of HPMR to avoid putting the whole program at risk. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The NMI Retirement Fund Board of Trustees has approved the issuance of a Request for Proposal for the hiring of a consultant to work on the entry of health insurance carriers under a privatized Group Health and Life Insurance program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}