Seema Verma to head CMS under Trump

President-elect Donald Trump has selected a health policy consulting firm CEO with close ties to his vice president and experience in Medicaid expansion to head CMS.

“I am pleased to nominate Seema Verma to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,” President-elect Trump said in a statement. “She has decades of experience advising on Medicare and Medicaid policy and helping states navigate our complicated systems.”

Verma’s most relevant government experience came working with Vice President-elect Mike Pence in Indiana, helping craft the state’s version of expanded Medicaid. The program she helped create, Healthy Indiana Plan 2.0, requiring beneficiaries to pay into health savings accounts and doesn’t provide retroactive benefits.

Her comments on the Healthy Indiana Plan in an August Health Affairs blog post shared some similarities with Trump’s own plan to turn Medicaid into a state-run block grant program.

“Enhancing state flexibility, particularly with respect to the low-income, able-bodied population, can help cultivate further state innovation, leading to a stronger and more effective Medicaid program," she wrote.

Through her consulting firm, SVC, Verma has worked on other Medicaid expansions with Republican governors, including Kentucky’s proposal, which includes an employment requirement to receive benefits.

“I am honored to be nominated by President-elect Trump today,” Verma said in a statement to POLITICO. “I look forward to helping him tackle our nation's daunting healthcare problems in a responsible and sustainable way."

Trump labeled Verma and his pick for HHS Secretary, U.S. Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia, as his “dream team” to change the healthcare system.

The pick doesn’t come without some controversy from liberal-leaning healthcare advocates. The Center for American Progress, which warned the current Affordable Care Act repeal timeline from Trump would “unravel” the insurance market long before a replacement plan is ready, criticized Varma’s stances on making Medicaid beneficiaries pay premiums and raising their deductibles.

"She even likes the idea of limiting the amount of benefits an insurance company must pay out each year and over a lifetime,” the center’s vice president for health policy, Topher Spiro, said in a statement. “The last thing working Americans need is more skin in the game in the form of extra costs; they need certainty that their health care will not be taken away from them.”