She said she could not give an estimate as to how much it will cost DMAS to dismantle CHIP — which is operated in Virginia as FAMIS, or Family Access to Medical Insurance Security Plan — because the process is only just beginning.

“Initially, it’ll be pretty much all staff costs,” she said. “There may well be some payments that have to be made to contractors for IT system changes and those kinds of things, and those will be real hard dollar costs. Most of it at this point is going to be, we’re pulling staff who should be working on other things to work on this, while at the same time we’re hoping that it never actually happens.”

DMAS is a $9 billion agency and operates the largest health insurance program in the state, Nablo said. The staff that is going to be unraveling CHIP and answering questions from families will doubtlessly be pulled from other projects.

“There’s a constant barrage of work to run a program that provides health coverage for over a million people,” she said. “So I can’t tell you specifically that something’s going to not get done, or what those consequences are, because again, we’re just really at the beginning of all this, and we’ll certainly try to do things in a way that minimizes the negative impact. But there are only so many people here.”