High-risk pool is vital to NM patients

ACCORDING TO a story in (the) Albuquerque Journal, opponents of Michelle Lujan Grisham have criticized her involvement with Delta Consulting, which manages the New Mexico Medical Insurance pool — commonly referred to as the high-risk pool. The attackers not only smear Lujan Grisham, who severed all ties with the consulting group last year, but in their eagerness to attack her, call for an end to the pool without understanding how badly the loss would affect those most in need.

The truth is we desperately need this insurance pool in New Mexico because it insures and manages care for the sickest and most expensive patients in our state. In a small state like ours, we have to be able to manage the financial risk posed by these patients so that the rest of the enrollees on the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange can have premiums they can afford.

Pool members with high-risk, very complex conditions cost tens of millions of dollars to care for. Many of them cannot obtain health insurance anywhere else, even on the exchange. Placing those who are eligible into the exchange would be a disaster for insurance plans that they might sign up with because it costs so much to provide their care. Health plans will either significantly increase costs for everyone else or simply decide not to offer health insurance plans to New Mexicans. Eliminating this pool would pose a huge financial risk to our small state and the enrollees who currently rely on the exchange for their health coverage.

And most importantly, if the pool were eliminated, the high-intensity needs of these patients would get lost in the shuffle. In this pool, their care is monitored and they are managed for the complexity of their condition.

These accusations that lead to calls for elimination of this valuable insurance pool serve only the political agenda of the attackers, who failed to do adequate research on the topic. There are those who would like to see all benefits of the Affordable Care Act destroyed and many of these attacks are generated by people of that ilk.

Negative campaigning is bad enough. But the attackers’ proposals, born in ignorance and desperation in the final hours of the primary election, are bad for New Mexico and bad for the patients. NANDINI PILLAI KUEHN Corrales