Price May Preserve Innovation Center Launched Under Obama

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, suggested he would want to preserve a Medicare and Medicaid innovation lab created in the Obama administration.

Price told the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday that innovation is important to medicine, and that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation “is a vehicle that might” support innovation. The CMMI was created under the Affordable Care Act to test new ways of delivering health care, with the goal of increasing quality and lowering costs.

“We can move CMMI in a direction that actually makes sense for patients,” Price said.

Republicans, including Price, railed against the center under the Obama administration, saying its demonstrations went too far by proposing projects that could be mandatory.

“That, to me, is no longer a trial,” Price said at the committee hearing. “That’s changing the way that American medicine is practiced.”