HHS Seeks to Reorient Obamacare Innovation Center

Even as the Trump administration works to repeal the Affordable Care Act, it is taking advantage of one of the 2010 law's provisions to advance its own take on health system innovation. Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on Sept. 20 announced plans to redirect the six-year-old Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation within the Health and Human Services Department. Its mission is to test new approaches or models to pay for and deliver high-quality health care more efficiently.

“We will move away from the assumption that Washington can engineer a more efficient health-care system from afar—that we should specify the processes health-care providers are required to follow,” Verma wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “We are analyzing all Innovation Center models to determine what is working and should continue, and what isn’t and shouldn’t,” she added. “The complexity of many of the current models might have encouraged consolidation within the health-care system, leading to fewer choices for patients.”

On Sept. 20, CMS published a Request for Information seeking “feedback on a new direction to promote patient-centered care and test market-driven reforms that empower beneficiaries as consumers, provide price transparency, increase choices and competition to drive quality, reduce costs and improve outcomes.” Suggestions for innovations are invited from clinicians, patients, entrepreneurs, state officials and others “on the front lines”...