Tennessee’s health care program for the poor proved to be less financially healthy for the state’s biggest health insurer last year.
But the chief financial officer for TennCare said he expects most of the plans in the program should do better over time as they continue to shift back into an at-risk, managed-care environment.
Scott Pierce, chief financial officer for TennCare, also said those insurers operating plans in TennCare are well capitalized and services are not threatened as they were with some smaller TennCare plans in the 1990s.
“When we wrote the bid proposals (in 2007), we really built in requirements that attracted players that had a lot of market share and were well capitalized with other books of business,” Mr. Pierce said. “We wanted to make sure we had plans that could withstand some losses as they transform the marketplace.”
Last year was the first full year since 2002 in which all of the managed care organizations that insure TennCare participants were put at financial risk. For the previous seven years, the state agreed to pay the insurers on a type of fee-for-service plan that TennCare was originally created in 1992 to replace.