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Seema Verma (born September 26, 1970) is a an American health policy expert and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Her tenure as CMS administrator was the longest in modern history, and she oversaw more than 6,000 employees providing health insurance programs to more than 140 million Americans. She was responsible for a budget of $1.3 trillion, almost a third of the federal budget. She currently gives speeches, writes articles, and serves on several boards.

Early life
Born in Virginia, Verma was a first-generation American. She and her family moved several times, living in small towns such as Joplin, Missouri, and larger cities such as the Washington D.C. area. She also lived in Taiwan for five years while growing up. In 1988, she graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. Verma's father, Jupal Verma, said his daughter "grew up in a Democratic household.”

She received a bachelor's degree in life sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1993. She earned a Master of Public Health, with a concentration in health policy and management, from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 1996.

Early career
After college, Seema worked at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials in Washington, D.C. Shen then served as vice president of the Health & Hospital Corporation of Marion County,

In 2001, she founded SVC, Inc., a health policy consulting firm. She was president and CEO of the company, which worked with state insurance agencies and public health agencies in preparation for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and assisted Indiana and Kentucky, as well as other states, in the design of Medicaid expansion programs under the ACA. In her work with Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, she developed Medicaid reform programs under the Section 1115 waiver process. In 2014, she was criticized for her dual roles as both a health care consultant for the state of Indiana and as a contractor for a division within Hewlett Packard, which was among the state’s largest Medicaid vendors. Verma said at the time: “SVC has disclosed to both HP and the state the relationship with the other to be transparent.”

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services


On November 29, 2016, President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to nominate Verma to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that oversees Medicare, Medicaid, and the insurance markets. On March 13, 2017, the United States Senate confirmed her nomination in a 55–43 vote. She was sworn into office on the Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is, a translation and commentary of the Bhagavad Gita by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), commonly known as the Hare Krishna movement.

Affordable Care Act
Verma was a critic of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), calling it a "failure." Throughout her tenure at CMS, she led President Trump's charge to repeal and replace Obamacare.

One of her first actions was to send a letter to the nation's governors, urging them to impose insurance premiums for Medicaid, charge Medicaid recipients for emergency room visits, and encourage recipients to obtain employment or job training as a requirement for Medicaid coverage. Verma made substantial cuts to the ACA Navigator program, making it more difficult for individuals to obtain coverage during open enrollment. On July 25, 2018, Verma gave a speech in San Francisco in which she criticized proposals for "Medicare for all". She stated that single-payer health care would destroy Medicare, which provides insurance for elderly people, and lead to "Medicare for None."

Accomplishments
During her time as administrator, Verma developed and implemented a new CMS strategic vision, which led to more than 16 initiatives designed to bolster the American health care system by lowering costs, increasing access and improving quality. She also ignited efforts by the federal government to increase market competition, empower patients, and unleash innovation producing historic reforms. Verma claimed to have driven efforts to require price and quality transparency while ensuring patients have ownership over their portable medical records.

She instituted an initiative called ‘’Patients Over Paperwork’’, which was designed to reduce regulatory burden and save the health care system billions of dollars.

Verma also worked to accelerate value-based care transformation and address the social determinants of health by advancing new payment models throughout CMS programs, including models for drug pricing that resulted in lower insulin prices. Under her leadership, premiums dropped in Medicare Advantage, Part D, and the insurance exchanges.

One of her priorities was to make it possible for states to implement work requirements for Medicaid. The Biden administration sought to reverse those moves.

Coronavirus Task Force
On March 2, 2020, Vice President Mike Pence announced Verma's addition to the White House Coronavirus Task Force. There, she led efforts to drive telehealth and remote care across the health care system while creating flexibility for health providers to augment the health care workforce, expand services and testing, and ensure access to vaccines and therapeutic treatments.

Criticisms
While head of CMS, on August 20, 2018, Verma filed a claim requesting that taxpayers reimburse her for jewelry she alleged was stolen on a work-related trip to San Francisco. Although she requested $47,000, including a $325 claim for moisturizer, $349 for noise-cancelling headphones, and a $5,900 Ivanka Trump-brand gold and diamond pendant worn during meetings with President Trump, she ultimately received $2,852.40 in reimbursement. Democratic Representative Joe Kennedy III called on Verma to resign immediately, calling her actions a taxpayer "bailout for stolen goods she chose not to insure".

In March 2019, Verma reportedly approved communications subcontracts worth more than $2 million of taxpayer funds to Republican-connected communications consultants and other expenses to boost her visibility and public image, leading to federal ethics and criminal investigations. Included in the consultants' work were proposals to have Verma featured in magazines like Glamour and have her invited to prestigious events to increase her public persona. Verma made an effort to purchase awards and honors for herself using taxpayer dollars. In July 2020, the HHS Inspector General reported that Verma spent more than $5 million in taxpayer funds to do communications work, and to help raise her profile. The report, a result of a 15-month investigation, concluded that Verma violated federal contracting rules: "CMS improperly administered the contracts and created improper employer-employee relationships between CMS and the contractors".

Press reports indicated Verma frequently clashed with her leadership, including HHS Secretary Tom Price and his successor Alex Azar, and her staff over a variety of issues. At one point, she reportedly threatened to ban a reporter after a negative story was published.

In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, she pushed Medicare career civil servant officials to finalize a plan to issue $200, branded with Trump's name, for Medicare recipients to use on drugs. The taxpayer-funded plan was estimated to cost $7.9 billion and draw from Medicare's trust fund.

In September 2020, Democrats on four congressional committees concluded that "Congress did not intend for taxpayer dollars to be spent on handpicked communications consultants used to promote Administrator Verma's public profile and personal brand. Administrator Verma has shown reckless disregard for the public's trust. We believe she should personally reimburse the taxpayers for these inappropriate expenditures." The panel concluded that she "may have violated federal law," leading Congress to request a formal legal opinion from the Government Accountability Office.

Verma spent more than $3.5 million on Republican Party-aligned consultants to promote her. These consultants were paid to help her write tweets and speeches, polish her profile, and broker meetings with companies and high-profile individual, including other members of government. Verma spent nearly $3,000 in taxpayer dollars on consulting fees for organizing a "Girl's Night" party thrown in her honor, hundreds of dollars for makeup artists, as well as $13,000 to promote herself to win awards and appear on panels. Verma's consultants aimed to place her on profile-enhancing lists, such as the Washingtonian's "Most Powerful Women in Washington" list, targeted media outlets for Verma with no clear connection to CMS initiatives (such as "Badass Women of DC"), and generated ideas for potential social events for Verma to attend, such as the Ford's Theatre Gala, Kennedy Center Honors, and Motion Picture Association events. The consultants provided her with talking points on repealing the Affordable Care Act in 2017, and helped her write a 2018 opinion column under her name in the Washington Post arguing for Medicaid work requirements. Verma was often accompanied by consultants as part of her travel entourage, billing CMS up to $380 per hour. She also used consultants as drivers at a rate up to $203 per hour and hotel rooms for official travel that cost more than $500 per night, hundreds of dollars above the government per diem rate.

These consultants, including one who was awaiting sentencing on a felony conviction for lying to Congress about misuse of taxpayer funds, led communications efforts on major policy initiatives and rollouts. CMS leadership provided them with access to sensitive information on proposed rule-makings, internal plans for anticipated policy roll-outs, and other potentially non-public, market-sensitive information. One of the outside consultants that Verma paid was Marcus Barlow, who had been her spokesperson at her former consulting firm SVC. He worked on three separate contracts for CMS, earning between $209–$230 an hour. According to the New York Times, this worked out to more than double the salary he would have received as a federal employee. As late as December 2020 during Verma's tenure, Barlow accompanied Verma and other CMS officials to an official function at the White House.

An HHS spokesperson referred to the Congressional report as “just another reckless, politically timed, drive-by hit job on a reform-driven Trump Administration official and, by extension, on President Trump himself.”

In 2021, Verma said she lost her CMS-issued cellphone two days before President Biden's inauguration, resulting in the elimination of all of its stored records. Verma then failed to complete the standard form explaining how she lost her phone, court records state. Verma was issued a new iPhone on January 18, which she returned nine days later. Records from that phone cannot be accessed because the phone was locked and Verma said she had forgotten her passcode.

Transition
In the final days of her tenure at CMS, Verma said she was committed to a smooth transition to the Biden administration and to ensuring continued response to Covid19. Following the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, she said she was “repulsed” over how some were treating Vice President Pence, and called the attack “disturbing” and “very hard to watch.” She formally submitted her resignation on January 13, effective on January 20, 2021

Current work
Verma currently serves on several boards, either as an advisor or director, and is a frequent speaker at health policy and health care delivery events.

She serves as a director for:
 * WellSky, a health care software and services company;
 * Lumeris, an analytical firm which provides guidance to health care delivery entities seeking to provide value-based care;
 * LifeStance, a virtual mental health platform;
 * Monogram Health, a healthcare provider that focuses on kidney disease; and
 * Zemplee, which provides health care software and services.

She also serves on the advisory board for Advancing American Freedom, former Vice President Mike Pence's conservative advocacy group, and is a senior advisor to TPG Capital, a U.S. private equity firm.

Personal life
Verma is married to Sanja Mishra, a child psychiatrist who has origins from Patna, Bihar. She and her husband live in Carmel, Indiana, and they have two children, a daughter and a son.