New Mexico Obamacare Co-op Paid Execs 6-Figure Salaries… Guess How That Ended for Them

This is a story from The Western Journal about how much executives at New Mexico Health Connections were paid. NMHC is a nonprofit co-op health insurance company formed under the Affordable Care Act.

Here's New Mexico Health Connections' 2015 federal tax return. The salaries start on page 7. Remember, it is a nonprofit formed the Affordable Care Act.

Here are some excerpts from the story:

"New Mexico Health Connections, one of the four remaining nonprofit Obamacare Co-ops did not inform its customers in June that it was insolvent and its entire board had resigned, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

"It also never told its customers the nonprofit paid its executives up to $450,000 in annual salaries.The nonprofit, one of 24 co-ops originally set up under Obamacare, was supposed to provide affordable health insurance to individuals, predominantly low-income citizens."

"The New Mexico Co-op boasted extraordinarily high six-figure salaries per year like many other failed Obamacare nonprofits, according to a DCNF review of its 2015 tax filing Form 990 with the Internal Revenue Service.

"Dr. Martin Hickey, the nonprofit’s CEO, received a $450,000 salary, according to its 990 tax form. It is unclear what his compensation was in 2017 when the co-op notified the state insurance superintendent it was insolvent."

" All 12 of the nonprofit’s top staff received six-figure salaries, according to its tax filing. Joining Hickey was Chief Medical Officer Dr. Mark Epstein who received an annual salary of $413,000, CEO Anne Sapon who received $342,000 and Primary Care staffer Frances Torres who received $318,000.The New Mexico co-op burned through $77.3 million in federal loans awarded by the Obama administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid in 2012. The nonprofit was “bleeding about $20 million in red ink a year,” an Albuquerque Journal editorial noted."

NMHC sold off its small and large group business - about 20,000 members - earlier this year to one of its vendors, Evolent Health, Inc., for $10 million. Evolent then formed a new insurance company, True Health New Mexico, Inc.

NMHC continues as a nonprofit co-op and insures about 18,000 people through individual policies, mostly through the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange.

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