Hours after she was sworn in, the Trump administration’s top official for Medicaid and her boss dispatched a letter to the nation’s governors, urging states to alter the insurance program for the nation’s poor by imposing insurance premiums, charging them for part of emergency room bills and prodding them to get jobs.
The letter, sent Tuesday night by Seema Verma, the new administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, also derides the Medicaid expansion that 31 states and the District of Columbia adopted under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).