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July 27, 2009 at 08:00 PM
State regulators are asking for relief from a federal agency’s new health plan reporting requirements.
Susan Voss, chair of the Receivership & Insolvency Task Force at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, Kansas City, Mo., has sent a letter asking the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to protect health plan receivers from Section 111 of the Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP Extension Act of 2007.
The new “secondary payer” reporting law and the regulations written to implement it require private health plans to give CMS extensive information about plan participants, to ensure that the private are taking their full share of responsibility for participants who may also be eligible for Medicare, Medicaid or State Children’s Health Insurance Program participants.
Voss is urging Barbara Wright, acting director of the Medicare debt management division at CMS, to exempt receivers of health plans that are in liquidation from the new reporting rules.
CMS also should exempt companies that are in rehabilitation and conservation, or else waive any Section 111 fines for those companies, Voss writes.
The receivers who handle troubled insurers work “to recover assets, adjudicate and pay claims, administer the estate of the insurance company, and in some cases rehabilitate the insurer,” Voss writes. “The Receiver’s overarching goal is to maximize the value of the estate for the claimants (e.g. policyholders, third parties, creditors, stockholders, etc.).”
Some receivers are trying to liquidate the companies, and others are trying to rehabilitate the companies, or at least to conserve their operations, Voss writes.
