Trump administration’s CMS head leads assault on Medicaid
By
Kate Randall
28 October 2017
The Trump administration’s attempts at health care “reform” have stalled in Washington, with numerous attempts to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act failing to pass the Republican-controlled Congress. However, this has not stopped the president and one of his top health care leaders from prosecuting a campaign to implement sweeping changes to Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, disabled and seniors that covers nearly 75 million people.
Seema Verma, director of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is campaigning to give states an “unprecedented level of flexibility” to design their Medicaid programs, reducing barriers for state requests for waivers from federal rules that protect access to benefits and preserve quality standards. The aim is to dismantle the $1 trillion Medicaid program as a guaranteed benefit based on need, first by imposing work requirements, obligatory premiums and other measures, with the ultimate goal of block granting and privatizing the program.
“We want to get to the point where we are making the whole waiver process easier,” Verma said at the Cleveland Clinic’s recent annual medical innovation summit. “We’re not going to tell the states what their priorities are. They are going to come and tell us what their priorities are,” she said. Under the guise of state “freedom,” states would have the power to strip eligible Medicare enrollees of coverage.
The political underpinning of Verma’s vision is that the expansion of Medicaid under the program commonly known as Obamacare has extended coverage to millions of low-income Americans who should not be getting…