Investigation of Medicare Chief Exposes Underside of Washington (more grifting)

Link to tweet

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/us/politics/seema-verma-investigation.html

WASHINGTON — A girls’ night at the Georgetown home of a prominent journalist, a lobbying push for soft-focus features in glossy magazines, a professional makeup artist and invitations to awards dinners and prestige panels.

The smorgasbord that expensive consultants laid out for Seema Verma, President Trump’s Medicare chief and a new arrival in town, proved to be enticing. The tab — $6 million in less than two years — fell to the federal taxpayer.

A yearlong investigation by congressional Democrats of Ms. Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, exposed not only a shadow operation to polish Ms. Verma’s personal brand but also the underside of life in Washington, where the personal and the professional often blend into a mélange of questionable interactions. Democrats said the report expanded on the findings of an audit in July by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services that criticized Ms. Verma’s use of outside consultants to perform “inherently governmental functions,” including strategic communications.

Ms. Verma runs an agency with a $1 trillion budget and 4,000 federal employees, overseeing federal health care programs used by 145 million poor and older Americans. The report released on Thursday outlined in detail the efforts of a team of handpicked Republican consultants paid by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as C.M.S., to work on Ms. Verma’s personal image, obtain profiles and coverage from friendly reporters, escort her during travel, write opinion articles and even draft her Twitter posts.

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