I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
In the wake of the nation’s new health care law, millions of Americans are coming to grips with a fact few understood before now: state regulators often have little power to stop cost hikes to health care premiums, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The Los Angeles Times looked at several states, not including New Mexico, and found the insurance industry exerts a surprising amount of over the regulating process through the amount of money—$42 million since 2003— the industry contributes to state officials.
There’s been much debate since April over New Mexico’s ability to reduce or reject health insurers’ requests for premium hikes and whether to change state law to give regulators such power — or make that power explicit, say a few who have argued that New Mexico already has that power but it’s vague.
It was in April that the New Mexico Division of Insurance approved a 21.3 percent increase to what about 40,000 New Mexicans pay Blue Cross Blue Shield New Mexico in monthly premiums for individual health care policies. (Granted, the 21 percent rate hike was lower than what Blue Cross originally proposed. But New Mexico officials achieved that lower premium rate increase through negotiations, not through any inherent power to reject a health insurer’s request for a rate increase and require a lower one, as Massachusetts has done in the past six months).
The insurance department’s approval of the 21 percent rate increase led to a tempest of protests, the resignation of the then-Insurance Superintendent and the insurance division reconsidering the request, a move that was unsuccessfully challenged in court by the insurer.
A criticism leveled repeatedly by critics of the decision – including members of the Public Regulation Commission, the agency the insurance division is under – was the lack of oversight exerted over the semi-autonomous insurance division under the current setup.
