By Patrick Malone
The New Mexican
New Mexico’s state-run health care marketplace has sharply reduced its enrollment expectations for 2014, cutting the estimated number of people expected to sign up for coverage by about half, the program’s chief said Thursday.
Mike Nuñez, interim chief executive officer of the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange, said problems with the federal healthcare.gov website when it was rolled out last fall slowed New Mexico’s efforts to promote enrollment in the exchange, resulting in drastically lowered enrollment expectations.
The state had expected up to 83,000 people to enroll in insurance plans through the exchange this year. Those figures were based on a 2011 study cited by the exchange in its application for a federal grant under the Affordable Care Act.
“We now estimate between 40,000 and 50,000,” Nuñez told The New Mexican in an email.
The exchange announced Thursday that it had received a $69.4 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The grant was about 85 percent of the $81.4 million the state had requested.
Nuñez said the grant was cut principally because of federal spending cuts commonly known as sequestration and also because of a lower than expected price tag for integrating some information technology systems for the exchange. Nuñez said he did not expect the reduced grant to hamper the exchange’s operations.
“We feel we can stand up the exchange with the grant awarded,” Nuñez said.
The first open-enrollment period for individual policies ends March 31, and small-business enrollment will continue throughout the year.
The New Mexico exchange got off to a sluggish start with 934 enrollments in November. Exchange administrators blamed the difficulties with the federal Web portal’s introduction. By Dec. 28, enrollment in the state had climbed to 7,688.
Currently, New Mexico’s health exchange website, www.BeWellNM.com, is a portal to the small-business insurance marketplace and redirects individuals to the federal site. A target date of Oct. 1 has been set for the site to begin serving the individual market as well.
Two previous federal grants to get the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange off the ground total $52.8 million.
Contact Patrick Malone at 986-3017 or pmalone@sfnewmexican.com. Follow him on Twitter @pmalonenm.