House Republican Leaders Demand Change in Focus at CMMI

In the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican leaders on the House Ways and Means Committee’s powerful Subcommittee on Health have sent a letter to leaders at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), demanding that leaders at CMMI, also referred to as the Innovation Center, change priorities and focus.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Missouri) stated in a statement posted to the Committee’s website that “The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) should return to its core mission and partner with the public to develop health care payment models that save taxpayer dollars and improve patient health – particularly for those in underserved or rural communities – write Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (MO-08) and Committee Republican members in a new letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and CMMI Director Abraham Sutton.”

In the letter addressed to Oz and to Sutton, Smith, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Florida), who is Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, and the 21 other Republican members of that Subcommittee, stated that “We write to express our interest in the priorities of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) under the Trump Administration. Congress created CMMI to build on the promise of value-based care by testing innovative care delivery and payment models that improve care quality and reduce costs to the government. We are concerned with the Center’s history of developing costly models that either fail to meet or are not on track to meet that standard which is rooted in statute. Furthermore, we strongly believe that prioritizing transparency and communication around changes to models is necessary for delivering stability and predictability to participants and will lead to more efficient model operations.”

The Republicans also wrote that “CMMI has a track record of promoting a political agenda ahead of its Congressionally mandated purpose. This fact was demonstrated during the Biden Administration by a 2021 ‘Strategy Refresh’ published by CMS that declared CMMI would focus on promoting a health equity agenda and minimized the importance of cost savings in models. Accordingly, the Congressional Budget Office found that CMMI increased direct spending by $5.4 billion in its first decade. In its nearly 15-year lifetime, only 6 out of more than 50 models have yielded significant savings.2 We were pleased to see CMMI recommit to the goal of pursuing payment models that will save money, including concluding or modifying existing models to achieve savings as evidenced in a recent press release.”

The full text of the letter can be found here.