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GOP lawmaker wants answers on health reform office

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WASHINGTON—The new Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is asking the director of a federal office partially responsible for implementing and administering the health care reform law why the office is being moved.

The letter, sent Thursday by Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., also requests information relating to the approval and denial of waivers from health care reform requirements.

Rep. Upton’s request involves the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, whose director is Jay Angoff, a former director of the Missouri Insurance Department. The Center formerly was known as the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

The CCIIO had been part of the office of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. But this month, Ms. Sebelius said she was moving the health care reform regulatory unit to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

At the time, Ms. Sebelius said moving the CCIIO would save money, improve efficiency and put the office in the hands of those with the “best resources in terms of expertise and administrative processes.”

While those are “laudable goals,” Rep. Upton wrote in his letter to Mr. Angoff, “the movement of the CCIIO to CMS also raises an important question: Why was the CCIIO created in the Office of the Secretary only to be transferred to CMS a few months later?”

Washington observers have said the real reason for the move was to limit Republican efforts to gut implementation of the law by blocking funding for the CCIIO and preventing development of rules to implement and enforce the reform law.

By embedding CCIIO within CMS, which administers the multi-hundred billion dollar Medicare and Medicaid programs, the administration would have greater ease finding funds to enable CCIIO to operate than if it were part of the HHS Secretary’s office, observers said.

In his letter, Rep. Upton also said it is “most troubling” that the CCIIO is responsible for deciding “who does not have to comply with the massive new regulations imposed” by the health care reform law.

Rep. Upton noted that CCIIO has approved 222 applications from employers, union funds, insurers and other organizations sponsoring mini-med plans seeking waivers from a regulation that sets the minimum annual dollar coverage limit health plans can impose on enrollees through 2013. Beginning in 2014, no annual limit can be imposed.

In his letter, Rep. Upton said his committee wants an explanation on how decisions are made on whether an exemption or a waiver from any part of the health care reform law, such as the annual dollar coverage limit, will be provided to organizations.