Jeff Grant speaks with Tom Temin of FNN about the layoffs at CMS and HHS and how they might impact CMS programs as well as the future of public health in America.

Excerpt

Tom Temin: You were at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services specifically. Tell us what you did there and how many employees it had relative to the tasks it was trying to do at that time.

Jeffrey Grant: So I worked at CMS in the role of managing HealthCare.gov and a few other major operations we had around the No Surprises Act, around making payments and things like that. My staff was 600 approximately total and CMS, overall, was about 6,700 people.

Tom Temin: And overall, CMS is Medicare and Medicaid, ultimately, the really big kahunas, you might say, of more than a trillion dollars a year. I think the figures about $1.5 trillion go out of there. And so I imagine it takes a certain amount of people to make sure that the money is spent properly. Is that basically what they do?

Jeffrey Grant: Oh, yes, it’s absolutely true. And the population of consumers in the ACA markets and beneficiaries under Medicare and Medicaid has also grown. So we’re taking care of money and we’re taking care of people. So you have over 150 million people under our care. So that was a huge responsibility that CMS bears.

Tom Temin: In that sense, CMS had twice the number of people that are under Social Security.

Jeffrey Grant: Correct. Because of Medicaid and the marketplaces.