The Healthcare Channel

Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Director Richard Gilfillan’s reply (Letters, June 14) to my op-ed of June 5 says that my accusations “are baseless.” This was backed up with no supporting evidence to refute my claims. He simply states that the contract company which operated the grant review reported no malfunctions. But that was the maddening part of my CMMI experience: CMMI did not seem to want to acknowledge any flaws in its system. Perhaps the reason for this was to allow the CMS officials to claim, “There is no record of any other complaints that the system to review applications wasn’t working.”

I sent an email to Dr. Gilfillan and his boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, so Dr. Gilfillan’s claim that he received no reports of complaints about the system is false. My peer-review team also sent complaints.

After my op-ed, and despite a new House oversight investigation having been initiated, CMMI is still rushing out more political favors in the form of “grants” to beat the Supreme Court ruling on the ObamaCare law. On June 15 CMMI announced 81 more “Innovation awards,” with each grant in the order of $20 million.