We have retained JD Bullington as our lobbyist for 2020. We hope we can continue to do so in 2021. But we need your help!! He did a superb job during the 2020 legislative session, attending all of the meetings and discussions fighting down the governor’s march towards Single Payer Health Coverage.

There were two bills that we spent tireless hours on, HB 100 which made changes to the State Exchange and adds standardized plans to the exchange but the most important part that we were able to add was giving agents a seat at the table when these standardized plans are being formulated and discussed. This bill did pass but agents are now a part of it. The second bill was HB 278 which would have increased health insurance premium taxes, subsequently increasing health insurance premiums by 3.25%. We formulated a phone tree amongst agents in every part of the state to drown the phones of the Senate Finance committee members and virtually got the bill pulled from that committee where it then stalled.

We have been working hard in this off-season on the Health Security Act meetings where the independent consultants came back with their study showing that if NM went to a Single Payer system, Medicare/Medicaid for all, it would create a $7 Billion dollar deficit over 5 years. We were present at all meetings and made public comments against this program.

We have also been very active in the public comment calls with the OSI and the Excepted Benefit Plans. We were able to take individual disability income out of these rules and we are working hard to try to maintain the quality and competitive pricing of all the good excepted benefit products out there. This takes a lot of time and constant attention.