Seema Verma, a healthcare innovator and the architect of the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP), has been nominated by President Donald Trump to head the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. In a new column for Becker’s Hospital Review, Anthony R. Tersigni, EdD, FACHE, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ascension, and Jonathan S. Nalli, Senior Vice President, Ascension Healthcare, and Indiana Ministry Market Executive, say they expect her to “bring a fresh perspective that can do for the nation what she's done for our patients.”
In Indiana, Seema created the nation’s first consumer-directed Medicaid program, delivering groundbreaking reform to the state's Medicaid program while garnering bipartisan support for how it expanded access and more fully engaged lower-income Indiana citizens in their healthcare choices.
“Since the inception of HIP in 2007, our colleagues at St. Louis-based Ascension’s 20-hospital system in Indiana have seen first-hand how HIP has improved the lives of countless Indiana residents,” Tony and Jonathan write. “We’ve seen how its pioneering approach to expanding coverage for the most vulnerable had the added benefit of better equipping Indiana physicians and nurses to provide the quality care our citizens deserved.”
After passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Seema crafted an innovative approach to even further expand care in Indiana. Working with Gov. Mike Pence, now the Vice President, she led development of HIP 2.0, bridging a partisan divide to create a new model for healthcare coverage.
“By creating this new pathway to care for hundreds of thousands Indiana patients, HIP 2.0 helped realize the fundamental goal of healthcare reform: ensuring greater access to care,” Tony and Jonathan write. “But by also including consumer-driven incentives that encouraged enrollees to be cost conscious, HIP 2.0 has also equipped patients to access the right care at the right time, rather than waiting for health problems to become emergent — a key priority for providers and lawmakers that can increase the quality of care and help reduce costs.”
Ascension’s Indiana physicians report that HIP members have responded well to the structure of their new coverage, including the consumer-driven elements that give patients and families a greater voice in directing their own care.
“Seema Verma has made it her life's work to advocate for these patients, and her track record of success in Indiana makes her precisely the type of leader we need at the national level: an innovator able to cut through the partisan divide, fight for patients and deliver results that make healthcare accessible and far more affordable,” the Ascension leaders write. “We strongly support her nomination and look forward to a continued partnership with her to ensure that low-income Americans not only have health insurance coverage, but access to quality care.”
Click here to read the full column at Becker’s Hospital Review.
