Today, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) announced the launch of a national multi-faceted initiative to hold the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) responsible for its lack of transparency, unchecked spending, and failed experimentation with Americans’ healthcare.

CMMI was established in the 2010 Affordable Care Act and provided with mandatory spending of $10 billion for each decade to create and test new payment models intended to save money and improve care. It has not achieved either objective. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that CMMI would save $2.8 billion between 2011-2020 but instead it cost $5.4 billion. CBO projects it will cost another $1.3 billion between 2021-2030.

Only four of the 49 models (8 percent) created between 2011-2020 showed enough potential to save money and improve care that they were continued. The losses from Medicare Advantage Value-Based Insurance Design, which began in 2017, reached $4.5 billion in 2021-2022, and after changes were made to save the program failed, it will be cancelled at the end of fiscal year 2025. The Trump administration has cancelled four other models that will also never save money or improve care.

“Like hundreds of other federal programs that were intended to reduce costs and increase efficiency, CMMI has become an abysmal failure that has little chance of redeeming itself,” said CCAGW President Tom Schatz. “CCAGW has been exposing the problems related to CMMI since 2016. This initiative will expand the spotlight on CMMI’s failures and lay the roadmap for what should be widespread support for its elimination, or at the very least long-overdue guardrails on the program’s operations to ensure that patients, providers, and taxpayers, will be put first.”

The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste is the lobbying arm of Citizens Against Government Waste, the nation’s largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.

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CMMI has become an abysmal failure that has little chance of redeeming itself.