Seema Verma
Administrator, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Seema Verma was born in Virginia. She received her undergraduate degree in life sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned a master’s degree in public health with a concentration in health policy and management from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She is a graduate of the Richard G. Lugar Excellence in Public Service Series, and was selected for the American Enterprise Institute’s Leadership Network.
Verma worked for the Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County as vice president of planning, and at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials in Washington, D.C. She founded a health policy consulting firm, SVC Inc., which worked with state insurance agencies and public health agencies in preparation for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. She assisted Indiana and Kentucky, as well as other states, in the design of Medicaid expansion programs.
She was nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the health department agency that oversees the Obamacare insurance markets, Medicare and Medicaid. She was confirmed by the Senate and assumed office in March 2017.
She is married to Sanjay Verma, a child psychiatrist, and they have two children.
In the News…
The federal government is relaxing a lot of rules and regulations for hospitals, giving them more flexibility in addressing COVID-19 patients, Seema Verma, Administrator of the Centers for Medicine and Medicaid Services and a senior member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force said. Hospitals can now operate inside dormitories, for example, as well as gyms, schools, and parking lots.
Right now, she said, thousands of civil servants at CMS are “moving heaven and earth” to make it easier for hospitals to care for patients.
She said FEMA is “doing an incredible job setting up these temporary hospitals in New York and other parts of the country. But we want to empower local communities to be able to take action and to tap into their local resources. So, for example, hospitals don’t need to be thinking about only providing services within their four walls. You know, right now there are surgery centers that are out there—about 5,000 of them across the country. And those surgery centers are not performing elective surgeries. So they have some capacity there, they have medical equipment.”
“We’re getting rid of lots of different regulations,” she said. “This is under the president’s emergency declaration, an emergency rulemaking, so we will be bringing some of these flexibilities back. … Quality is top of mind, but this is an unprecedented crisis for the health care system, and we’ve got to make sure that we provide enough flexibility so that they can give quality care.”
Contact this Leader…
Did you pray for Administrator Verma today? You can let her know at:
Administrator Seema Verma
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
200 Independence Ave SW
Washington, DC 20201
