Managers of the Trump administration's Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services want to hear from the public about ways to revamp government health care programs.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, an idea development lab inside CMS, has put out an informal "request for information" (RFI) from the general public.
The innovation center is 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," the center says on the RFI website.
Drafters of the Affordable Care Act created the innovation center in an effort to organize tests of ideas for improving Medicare, Medicaid and other government health care delivery and payment programs.
Because the programs are so big, any changes they make could also end up reshaping the commercial health insurance market, and, possibly, non-health insurance markets.
Tom Price, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the parent of CMS and the innovation center, recently wrote to the innovation center to ask it to give up on existing programs that could require care providers to put the cost of treating some kinds of conditions into bundles, in the hope of saving money by discouraging providers from increasing their revenue by billing for extra, closely related services.
Innovation center officials are asking in the new RFI that respondents try to base their ideas on "objective, empirical and actionable evidence," and to cite the evidence in their responses.
Officials note that they will simply use the replies for planning purposes. The notice is not an official request for proposals or part of a procurement process.
CMS may end up posting the comments it gets, or a summary of the comments, on the web, officials say.
Replies to the request for information are due at 11:59 p.m. EST Nov. 20.
A copy of the request for information, which includes a link to the RFI comment form, is available here.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
