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WASHINGTON—The Obama administration on Tuesday renamed a key regulatory unit charged with developing health care reform rules and shifted that unit to the massive Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ office.
The Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight now is known as the Center for Consumer and Insurance Oversight.
The CCIO will be headed by Steve Larsen, who had been director of the OCIIO’s Division of Insurance Oversight. Previously, Mr. Larsen was Maryland’s insurance commissioner and joined the OCIIO soon after the passage of health care reform legislation last year.
Jay Angoff, the prior head of the OCIIO and a one-time Missouri insurance commissioner, now will be a senior adviser to Ms. Sebelius.
Washington observers have said the real reason behind the moving of the regulatory office to within CMS was to blunt Republican efforts to gut implementation of the law by blocking funding for the OCIIO and prevent development of rules to implement and enforce the reform law.
By embedding the CCIO within CMS, which administers the multi-hundred-billion-dollar Medicare and Medicaid programs, the administration should have greater ease finding funds within CMS to enable CCIO to operate than as part of the HHS secretary’s office, observers said.
The OCIIO developed rules on numerous provisions in the health care reform law including the extension of group coverage to employees’ adult children up to age 26, exemption from certain health reform laws for grandfathered plans and federal subsidies provided to employers and other organizations sponsoring early retiree health care plans.