Let’s add the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to DOGE’s chopping block

OPINION:

Big government experiments always promise efficiency, cost savings, and improved outcomes. Yet, time and again, they deliver the opposite: Inefficiency, taxpayer waste, and regulatory overreach.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) is no exception.

CMMI was created by Obamacare to test new payment models in Medicare and Medicaid, with the aim of lowering health care costs and improving quality. Instead, it has ballooned into an expensive, unaccountable bureaucracy that undercuts market dynamics and limits patient choice.

In 2016, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that CMMI would save taxpayers $34 billion by 2026. However, the program’s efforts are expected to cost taxpayers $9.4 billion. Indeed, the CBO now expects the program to continue driving up taxpayers’ costs over the next 10 years.

President Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team need to scrap it. CMMI is a costly boondoggle that has disrupted health care delivery and handed enormous policymaking power to unelected bureaucrats unaccountable to lawmakers.

In any private-sector scenario, a program that dramatically missed its financial targets would be shut down. But because it’s a government program, CMMI continues to burn through taxpayer dollars, insulated from proper accountability.

CMMI’s track record would be comical if it weren’t costing taxpayers so much money.

Consider the “Primary Care First Model.” Meant to strengthen primary care delivery, it wasted $847 million without measurable improvements in patient outcomes.

Or consider the “Oncology Care Model.” Designed to reduce cancer treatment costs, it costs $761 million while producing no significant changes in treatment quality or patient experience.

The list of errors goes on. Indeed, between 2011 and 2020, CMMI spent $7.9 billion on so-called “innovation” models — yet 88% of them have not yielded any “statistically significant savings.”

Basic economics tells us that competition drives innovation and efficiency. However, the bureaucrats who work at CMMI have long believed that government-knows-best, top-down mandates – combined with a bit of socialist fairy dust – will successfully out deliver and outprice the market.

CMMI has gotten away with all this by exploiting its statutory authority to bypass Congress entirely, rolling out costly, unproven models by calling them “demonstration projects.”

With this unchecked power, CMMI has empowered unelected bureaucrats to dictate how doctors nationwide are paid and what treatments patients receive. Even when providers refuse to participate, CMMI can force them into experimental payment models, overriding traditional Medicare payment structures. When these models fail, CMMI can – and does – simply repackage them as “new” initiatives to keep them running.

Obamacare has been riddled with broken promises, and CMMI is one of its most costly failures. Rather than lowering costs and improving care, it has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, interfered with patient care, and expanded the power of unelected bureaucrats.

President Trump and Elon Musk have the opportunity – and responsibility – to axe this unaccountable bureaucracy.

• Ryan Ellis is president of the Center for a Free Economy and an IRS enrolled agent.