9/23/2014
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — After missing many of its targets in the first year of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act in New Mexico, the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange board is shaking things up.
source
Photo from a NHIX commercial
A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE: After posting disappointing enrollment numbers, the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange is putting its marketing and advertising account back up for bid.
On Friday, the board announced it’s pulling its $6.2 million advertising and marketing contract from BVK, a firm based in Milwaukee, and putting the contract back up for bid.
“There are lots of clean slates and one of those is marketing,” said Dr. Martin Hickey, director of the NMHIX Marketing, public relations and outreach committee.
The NMHIX board voted unanimously Friday to rebid the contract.
The decision comes after a statewide poll showed that, despite spending $7 millionmarketing in New Mexico, only 40 percent of respondents knew what the state’s health care exchange did.
BVK is eligible to rebid for the contract. Hickey said as of Friday he had not heard if BVK plans to try again to win back the NMHIX contract.
BVK spokeswoman Annie Holschuh sent an email to New Mexico Watchdog saying, “BVK will have a statement to share in the near future but we decline to comment on the topic at this time.”
“It has been a year of lots of learning,” said Hickey, choosing his words carefully after Friday’s board meeting.
“My belief from the very beginning was that our marketing needed to be focused on boots on the ground and neighbor-to-neighbor contact,” board member Jason Sandel told New Mexico Watchdog. “I think there are a number of studies that show you take the message where people are … Instead, we invested a tremendous amount of money in a television buy and expected a 30- or 60-second television ad to convince somebody to change their lifestyle.”
NMHIX also has a new person in charge. Amy Dowd is the new CEO of the state’s exchange, coming to New Mexico after running the state exchange in Idaho. She replaced interim CEO Mike Nuñez.
Dowd outlined a 60-day plan to make a decision on advertising and marketing, telling the board Friday there will be “heavy weighting of knowledge of New Mexico and knowledge of the Spanish community and Native American tribes.”
Time is a factor since the next open enrollment period for people signing up for individual policies under the ACA — colloquially known as “Obamacare” — starts on November 15.
NMHIX chairman Dr. J.R. Damron told New Mexico Watchdog that NMHIX has about $4 million on hand to spend on advertising and marketing between October and next February 15, when the enrollment period is scheduled to end. Dowd, however, was reluctant to talk about how much money will be spent.
“I’m looking very strategically how we’re going to spend this money,” Dowd told New Mexico Watchdog.
“We’re concerned about the enrollment numbers we had this past year,” said Damron. “We felt like we needed to look at this … and change our business plan.”
Small businesses in New Mexico can sign up for the ACA through NMHIX, but individual policies in the state will have to go through the federal government’s www.healthcare.gov website, which stumbled badly in its national rollout earlier this year.
NMHIX officials have blamed the website’s multiple breakdowns for keeping New Mexico’s enrollment from reaching its goals.
Just before healthcare.gov debuted, NMHIX planned on signing up 83,000 people to individual policies across the state this year. Going into the November open enrollment period, 32,000 had signed up.
In addition, numbers released this spring showed that while 85 percent of those who signed up for individual polices across the country qualified for federal subsidies, just 79 percent of those in New Mexico received subsidies.
source
No comments:
Post a Comment