Insurer-hub board passes budget redo

The Arkansas Health Insurance Marketplace board of directors Wednesday approved a revised grant budget allocating less money for computerized enrollment and more for staff salaries.

The budget was reworked after the board received a $99.9 million federal grant to set up health insurance exchanges for small businesses and individual consumers, less than the $126 million it had requested.

Initially, $78 million had been budgeted for a computer-based enrollment system. The board Wednesday approved a budget of $64,159,836 for an online marketplace, about $13.8 million less.

The board has said the system will cost less than originally estimated and described its new budget as a comfortable amount.

Elsewhere in the budget, the board approved a $5 million cut to a proposed $15 million consumer assistance call center. It also reduced funds to pay a marketing firm from $10 million to $3 million.

Travel and training budgets were reduced, as well, and a $200,000 health care conference the marketplace had planned to host was eliminated.

Each of the reductions was proposed by the board's grant committee Friday, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported.

Recommended increases to salaries and fringe benefits were approved Wednesday, as the board raised the number of budgeted employees from 12 to 25. The funds total $8.2 million over three years, $4.2 million more than had initially been set aside.

The positions are needed to cover certain Arkansas Department of Insurance duties being handled by the marketplace sooner than expected, board spokesman Heather Haywood said.

Though a proposed transfer of grant money from the state Insurance Department might balance some of the cuts, board members said Wednesday that the budget had been revised without additional funds in mind. It will be adjusted if more money comes through, they said.

The revised budget was sent to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for approval.

The board Wednesday also approved the reorganization of its stakeholder engagement structure, merging its plan-management committee with a state Insurance Department counterpart. The committee will include board members and members of the public, as will two others: a committee on consumer assistance and a committee on outreach and marketing.

"Part of the the requirement for an exchange, whether it's the partnership or the state, is stakeholder engagement, and you have to have a stakeholder engagement model," Haywood said.

The three committees will each be composed of representatives of the board; the state Department of Human Services; the Arkansas Department of Insurance; a hospital or hospital association; a health care broker; a health care carrier; and a business.

"Representation from the small-business community is important ... the small-business owner is who the exchange is for," Haywood said.

The plan-management and consumer assistance committees will additionally include a representative of a nonhospital health care provider, an individual health care consumer and a health care advocate representing "specific subpopulations," such as youths, ethnic groups or those with certain lifelong diseases.

The board will determine at a later date when to implement the new committee structure.

All marketplace board members will be invited to serve on the committees and will vote to appoint interested members of the public.

Initial terms for committee members will be 1 to 3 years. Subsequent terms will be 2 years with an option to be reassigned to a different committee.

Each committee will have three co-chairmen, one of whom must be a board member.

The board's next meeting was set for May 13.

Metro on 04/23/2015

Upcoming Events