It is no secret that the American healthcare system is plagued by an infection of bureaucracy. While patients navigate mazes of red tape, providers navigate a landscape of changing regulations and guidelines that constantly evolve on the whims of unelected bureaucrats.
One of the federal government’s most egregious misfires is the Department of Health and Human Services’ so-called Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), a poster child of the Affordable Care Act’s wishful thinking and wasteful spending. CMMI was intended to save taxpayer money while improving patient access to affordable, quality health services. Instead, it has proven to be a disastrous experiment, losing billions of taxpayer dollars on “models” or experiments that disrupt treatment and leave patients worse off. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that CMMI would save $2.8 billion between 2011-2020, but it lost $5.4 billion and will lose another $1.3 billion by 2030.
Adding insult to injury, CMMI operates with little accountability, enabling it to pursue disruptive healthcare changes that effectively rewrite legislation. But new polling just released by the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste shows that the American people have caught on and are calling on their elected leaders in Congress to fix the problems.
The survey shows strong support for Congress to rethink CMMI funding, establish safeguards that protect patients and caregivers from CMMI efforts to impose broad-scale policy changes under the guise of “demonstrations,” and provide stronger congressional oversight and accountability.
Americans are overwhelmingly weighed down by the high cost and complexity of healthcare, with 69 percent agreeing that healthcare costs are a major burden on their family, and nearly nine in 10 agreeing that America’s healthcare system has become unnecessarily complex.
In fact, more than two-thirds of Americans believe that the more the government becomes involved in healthcare, the worse it becomes. Almost 70 percent of voters polled said they believe the government interferes too much in their lives, and, when they learned about CMMI, 78 percent said they were concerned that the program increases government influence and control over personal healthcare decisions that should be left up to patients and their doctors.
Though it is no surprise that most Americans support increased accountability for CMMI, this poll confirms what CCAGW has long argued: CMMI is an ill-advised, wasteful use of taxpayer dollars and should be eliminated.
In fact, just 29 percent of respondents believe CMMI’s $10 billion-per-decade budget is appropriate, and 61 percent believe CMMI’s models that fail to generate substantial savings should be eliminated.
Navigating the healthcare system should be a personal decision, not an uphill battle against bureaucracy, and CMMI’s one-size-fits-all approach is making care worse while burning taxpayer resources. More than three in four Americans think a customized approach that allows flexibility for individual patients would be better than CMMI’s imposition of one-size-fits-all policies.
The American people have spoken, and the solution is clear: restore accountability, put patients first, and eliminate CMMI.
Tom Schatz is President of Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW).
