Health Agency Slated To Cut Spending By $3B Grew It By $5B

The Trump administration isn’t merely slashing wasteful spending. It’s publicizing each cut — and opening Americans’ eyes to just how much taxpayer money has been wasted on programs that were pointless, redundant, or downright harmful. 

In short, ordinary voters are finally getting to see what inside-the-Beltway conservatives have witnessed for decades: Government agencies almost never deliver on their promises.

Take, for instance, the abject failure of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), which is back in the news after it announced the early cancellation of several initiatives that, if completed as scheduled, would have wasted $750 million in taxpayer funds.

Obamacare established CMMI and tasked the agency with finding new ways to reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending while improving care. A decade and a half later, CMMI has failed to achieve its goals — and thrown away billions of taxpayer dollars in the process.

That’s why President Trump and Congress should make ending CMMI their next big waste-cutting move.

Just look at the numbers. CMMI employs roughly 500 bureaucrats and receives $10 billion in mandatory funding each decade. With those resources, you’d expect federal workers could find and fix some flaws in Medicare and Medicaid, which don’t exactly have a reputation for unparalleled efficiency.

Instead, just six of the 49 new care models it launched in its first decade produced statistically significant savings. And those savings have been meager compared to the enormous losses incurred by the center’s failures.

CMMI’s biggest success, the Prior Authorization of Repetitive, Scheduled Non-Emergent Ambulance Transport model, was estimated to create $1.1 billion in net savings over five years. In contrast, just one of its failures — the Medicare Advantage Value-Based Insurance Design model — racked up losses of over four times that amount in less than half the time.

In total, rather than reducing spending by $2.8 billion between 2011 and 2020, as the Congressional Budget Office predicted, CMMI increased net spending by $5.4 billion during that time period. And it’s projected to raise spending by at least another $1 billion by 2030.

If a company spent billions of dollars to implement 49 pilot programs and 43 of them failed to deliver results, it would be regarded as a catastrophic failure. Indeed, it’d most likely be shut down long before compiling such an abysmal track record. America elected President Trump to bring that common sense and private-sector efficiency to government.

CMMI has also frequently overstepped its authority. Instead of testing proposed reforms in small-scale settings, it has pushed sweeping, mandatory payment changes that affect patients across the nation. In many cases, it has skipped over legally required evaluations in order to extend its failing policies.

CMMI also displays a complete disregard for patients’ input or experiences. It rarely solicits feedback from the public. When doctors and experts on the Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee suggested 14 policies for CMMI to test, it rejected every single one.

Unelected bureaucrats shouldn’t be given free rein to run fruitless experiments on Americans’ health care — much less be allowed to squander billions of our taxpayer dollars to do it.

President Trump and Congress can help rein in this waste and government overreach by putting an end to CMMI. Its failed experiments and bureaucratic overreach have gone on far too long.