Full article reprinted from "The Gray Sheet" - November 30, 2009
Health care policy experts are largely resigned to waiting until health care reform legislation passes to learn who the next CMS administrator will be, but some are dismayed that 10 months into a new administration, no permanent appointee has been named to lead the world's largest and most influential health care payer. Read more...
Top CMS Job Remains Empty Despite Big Medicare Changes On The Horizon
Full article reprinted from "The Gray Sheet" - November 30, 2009
Health care policy experts are largely resigned to waiting until health care reform legislation passes to learn who the next CMS administrator will be, but some are dismayed that 10 months into a new administration, no permanent appointee has been named to lead the world's largest and most influential health care payer.
Following the November 2008 presidential election, some Washington insiders expected the incoming administration would quickly fill the top CMS post (The Gray Sheet' Dec. 1, 2008).
"We're talking about an agency with spending that amounts to about 3% of the gross national product," said Tom Gustafson, senior policy advisor at Arnold & Porter. "It seems a little odd that they haven't gotten someone confirmed and in charge over there."
Gail Wilensky, a senior fellow for Project Hope and a former administrator at the Health Care Financing Administration, now CMS, agreed.
"It's a mystery to me why an administration that is placing as much importance on health care and health care reform would allow this much time to pass without having an administrator in place," said Wilensky. "There has not been a confirmed administrator since the fall of 2007."
Wilensky surmised that some early candidates for the CMS post may have reconsidered accepting an appointment once Tom Daschle's name was withdrawn from the Secretary of Health and Human Services nomination.
"Well, that's a long time ago," Wilensky said, "so honestly, I find it completely bizarre" that the CMS position is still open.
While sources interviewed for this story were reluctant to single out top candidates, some names that had been mentioned earlier in the process seem to keep resurfacing as possibilities.
"Some of them seem highly plausible and then turn out to be completely manufactured by rumor," said Sean Tunis, director of the Center for Medical Technology Policy and a former chief medical officer at CMS. "I would say that no new name has surfaced that I would want to add to any potential game of telephone."
Gustafson called the current talk surrounding the search for a CMS administrator an information vacuum.
"Those that are in the know are not likely to be talking to anybody about it, and those who are talking about it probably don't know much," he said.
Pending Legislation Could Be Slowing Nomination
Although a spokesman for HHS could not comment on the status of the timing for an announcement on a new CMS administrator, some observers suggested that the administration could have its hands full with the health care reform debate.
"My instinct would be that the administration is not likely to want to create any issue that could raise any concerns or distract anyone either in Congress or in the public away from getting health care reform passed," said Ed Dougherty, senior vice president at B&D Consulting.
"I would have told you three or four months ago that it was really important to get somebody there," said Tunis, "but it's three or four months later, and nothing catastrophic has occurred, so it seems to me like the timeframe of getting to some resolution on health reform is not so far in the future that it's unreasonable to do it after that."
Tunis added that as time goes on, it becomes more unlikely that a CMS administrator would be named before health care reform is resolved.
AdvaMed Senior Executive VP David Nexon does not think it makes sense to delay the CMS nomination process until health care reform passes.
He acknowledges that at this point, because the Senate Finance committee is "pretty absorbed" with health care reform, it might be difficult to get an immediate hearing to confirm a new CMS administrator.
- Monica Hogan
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