U.S. Reps. Larry Bucshon (R-IN) and Susan Brooks (R-IN) and Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN) called on Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Silvia Burwell on Thursday to terminate a second evaluation of Indiana’s Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) 2.0 waiver by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
“As you know, the state of Indiana worked in good faith with CMS for over two years to reach an agreement on the expansion of Indiana’s homegrown, health savings account-based HIP program,” the legislators said in a letter to Burwell. “It is our understanding that the agreement between CMS and the state calls for very detailed evaluation protocols, which are much more rigorous than those found in previous HIP waivers approved by CMS. The state is using an independent evaluator, as has been the case during the HIP program’s entire eight-year history. This evaluation process has worked well in the past.”
Indiana is required to submit an interim evaluation of HIP 2.0 by mid-2016 under an agreement with HHS. An independent consultant has been retained by the state of Indiana to perform the review.
“We are concerned that CMS has now decided to alter the process by separately contracting for a second review of the HIP 2.0 program,” the letter said. “To our knowledge, CMS is not singling out any other waiver in any other state for special review, and the agency has not conducted any such additional waiver reviews in well over a decade. In addition, the Urban Institute, part of CMS’s team of contractors, is on record having levied policy-based criticism against the HIP model prior to being selected as program evaluator. The demonstrated bias of the Urban Institute calls into question its ability to conduct a fair and impartial review the HIP program.”
The letter also called the second evaluation “a highly unusual action that is duplicative of the effective process under which waiver programs like HIP have previously been evaluated. Furthermore, the selection of a known critic of HIP 2.0 as part of the CMS-led evaluation team calls into question the impartiality of this additional review. As a result, we urge you to terminate this additional CMS-led evaluation.”