WASHINGTON, D.C. (Office of the CNMI Congressional Delegate) — The Commonwealth will save $1,720,000 of its required match of federal Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program grants in the current fiscal year. The federal government had been waiving just $200,000 of the required match since 1983. The new, higher waiver amount for fiscal 2024 will continue in following years, adjusted for any inflation in the cost of health care.
“This is good news for our cash-strapped Commonwealth government and, particularly for the Commonwealth Healthcare Corporation, which covers the lion’s share of the match each year,” said U.S. Congressman Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan.
He has been working intensely with the Biden White House on the waiver issue since the President’s Office of Management and Budget issued a “Controller Alert” last year, advising federal agencies they had wide discretion to waive any local match requirement for the Marianas and other small insular areas.
The Alert was highlighted in the annual Interagency Group on Insular Areas meeting in 2023 at which Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced she would now waive any matching requirement for grants from her department.
Immediately after, Sablan led his insular area colleagues to ask President Biden to follow up on the IGIA announcement by sharing any information about agency reviews of the law that would prevent the waivers. “A waiver of local match requirements would not only reduce the financial burden on territorial governments for grants currently received,” the insular Delegates wrote, “but would also encourage applications for grants previously passed over because a match was prohibitively expensive.”
Previously, Sablan and other insular area representatives have introduced legislation to amend the 1983 law and increase the $200,000 waiver. Those efforts have been unsuccessful.
“Today’s announcement that the Medicaid match is being lowered by $1.7 million is significant, of course,” Kilili said on Thursday. “There is much more work to be done, however, to get rid of these matching requirements for all federal grants to the Marianas and other insular areas.”
