For the nth time, the NMI Retirement Fund extended its contract with third party administrator Hawaii Pacific Medical Referral up to end of December this year pending negotiations for the privatization of the government\u2019s group health insurance program.<\/p>\n
Fund administrator Karl T. Reyes said yesterday that HPMR will continue to provide services until a new health insurance company is chosen to handle the entire program.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have asked them to extend [their] services up to Dec. 31,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Also, he said the Request for Proposal for the health insurance privatization is also being extended.<\/p>\n
This means that negotiations with the proposer, Select Care, will resume in November, he said, noting that government consultant on healthcare insurance Karen Bauder is currently tied up with Guam and can only handle the CNMI issue by November this year. Bauder was also hired by Guam to address its healthcare insurance program.<\/p>\n
Reyes said that, although the Fund is negotiating with Select Care, no awarding of contract has been made yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been identified but it\u2019s not yet awarded. We\u2019re still negotiating with them,\u201d said Reyes.<\/p>\n
Bauder has been working on the proposal of Select Care, one of only two companies that responded to the Fund\u2019 RFP to privatize the group health plan.<\/p>\n
Reyes said it takes a considerable time to come up with a final agreement due to major concerns, especially on costs and types of services.<\/p>\n
The Fund last extended HPMR\u2019s contract in June to August 31. HPMR\u2019s three-year contract originally expired in July 2004.<\/p>\n
As the government remains unprepared to implement the privatization, the contract gets extended almost every quarter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the nth time, the NMI Retirement Fund extended its contract with third party administrator Hawaii Pacific Medical Referral up to end of December this year pending negotiations for the privatization of the government\u2019s group health 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-92938","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\/92938","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=92938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}