U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX), chairman of the House Budget Committee Health Care Task Force, is seeking an investigation into the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and its impact on the federal budget.
The goal of the task force is to find solutions to reduce healthcare spending, examine opportunities to modernize and personalize the healthcare system, and support policies to fuel innovation and increase patient access to quality and affordable care. Rep. Burgess and U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) launched the task force last August.
In an April 26 letter sent to U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, Reps. Burgess and Arrington requested that GAO update its earlier work by providing them with new details about CMMI’s use of dedicated funding and to assess its performance. GAO previously reported on CMMI activities in November 2012 and on the agency’s performance and use of its resources in March 2018.
CMMI was established within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to test new approaches to healthcare delivery that could curb spending while providing better care.
The law also provided CMS with additional authority when testing new healthcare delivery and payment approaches, known as models, and provided a permanent mandatory appropriation stream for testing those models — $10 billion for the CMMI’s activities for the period of fiscal years 2011 through 2019, and $10 billion every decade beginning in FY 2020.
In 2010, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated CMMI would result in net savings of $1.3 billion over the 10-year budget window. Now though, the CBO projects that CMMI’s activities will increase net federal spending by $1.3 billion in Medicare, over the center’s second decade, which extends from 2021 to 2030, according to their letter.
Rep. Burgess and Rep. Arrington requested that the GAO’s investigation examine a number of items, including how CMMI has used dedicated funding to develop models and carry out other agency functions, and how much of CMMI’s first $10 billion mandatory appropriation was used by the center prior to it receiving its second $10 billion in funding in FY 2020, among others.