Congress Must Repeal or Restrain Obamacare's CMMI

Dear Member of Congress:

As policymakers wrap up business this year as well as prepare for a new Congress and administration, repealing and replacing Obamacare is at the top of the agenda. There are dozens of complex policy issues surrounding health care reform. One standout that urgently needs scrutiny is the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI.)

CMMI was created by Obamacare in order to facilitate demonstration projects for payments and services within those programs. Unfortunately, the outgoing Obama Administration chose to engage in executive overreach on several CMMI initiatives by making them involuntary, nationwide policy changes. Perhaps the most alarming example so far is the Medicare Part B demonstration project, which impacts cancer patients and doctors in 49 states. 

Another reason to repeal CMMI, or at least to construct guardrails that can curb abusive measures like the Part B Demo, is the way that the Congressional Budget Office has scored the agency's activities. CBO thinks that CMMI’s unelected bureaucrats will save tens of billions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, but if the people’s elected representatives want to set policy instead, it will "cost" taxpayer dollars. This is not only bad scoring, it's an inappropriate weakening of Congress' right to make entitlement policy. Any CMMI changes short of repeal should correct this grave scorekeeping error, before it further upsets the balance of power in the policymaking process.