McClatchy DC Bureau

By: Tony Pugh

Having Seema Verma as the head of the CMS program may affect the poor people’s health insurance coverage, as the prices are likely to go up. This is likely to occur since Seema Verma was involved in the HIP 2.0 program for Indiana’s Medicaid beneficiaries.

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The ideologically driven rules are just “bad health policy,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University in Washington. “Forcing people to remain uninsured for six months is too high a price to pay for missing a deadline,” Alker said. “This is a population that by definition has fallen on hard times. So (there’s a greater) likelihood of them missing a payment because of unemployment, administrative errors or residential instability because many are homeless or near homeless. These kinds of issues are real barriers.”

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