Babauta, who was in the Senate chamber yesterday to express support for Gov. Benigno R. Fitial’s nominees for the healthcare advisory board, declined to comment when asked if he wishes to serve as the public corporation’s CEO.
But Villagomez, who sat with him in the gallery, said he was hoping Babauta would head the corporation.
“That will be great. I’m hoping that he gets it,” Villagomez said, adding that he believes the former governor “will be a great head of the healthcare corporation.”
Babauta is the governor’s “special adviser for health matters.”
After expressing support for the board nominees, Babauta brought up the many issues facing the CNMI’s healthcare system.
He said although the Healthcare Corporation Act of 2008, which takes the healthcare system out of the government’s hands, is “not perfect,” it is a “major undertaking.”
He noted that that from $44.7 million in FY 2005, the budget for Public Health went down to $32 million in FY 2010, then to $22 million in FY 2011.
The budget for the healthcare system now is $5 million.
“We need to generate more than that,” Babauta said.
He said the major mandates placed on the corporation include upgrading of facilities in the hospital like the generators, the incinerator, dental and medical equipment as well as the health centers on Tinian and Rota.
Another major challenge, he said, is living up with a policy to accommodate indigent patients as required by law.
“The law says we cannot deny any one medical care, so someone, somewhere has to pay for them,” he added.
The Commonwealth Health Center right now has 20 indigent dialysis patients who are neither CNMI residents nor U.S. citizens. The treatment for each of them, Babauta said, costs $5,000 a month.
“We need to negotiate payment with their respective governments,” he added.
He said of the almost 16,000 Medicaid patients in the CNMI, only 7,224 are NMI descents. The rest are “all others.”
The growing number of patients eligible for Medicaid, Babauta said, has resulted in $3 million “over the cap, which is 100 percent CNMI money.”
He also cited the applicability of the U.S. Affordable Healthcare Act here, including the newly enacted “Obamacare” insurance exchanges which will apply to the CNMI starting in Jan. 2014.
The CNMI, he added, can come up with its local legislation to create an insurance exchange program.
If the CNMI fails to do it by Jan. 2014, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will establish it.
Now is the time to do it, he said. “We need to go with what we’ve got. We can always change the law along the way to make it better. We don’t want to perpetuate the same system under a different name.”
