Seema Verma

Seema Verma (born September 26, 1970) is a General Manager and Senior Vice President at Oracle Corporation.

She is the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the Donald Trump administration.

During her tenure, she was involved in efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as reduce Medicaid benefits and increase restrictions on Medicaid.

She was embroiled in ethics and legal controversies related to her use of taxpayer money while in office.

Born in Virginia, Verma was a first-generation Indian 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, Jugal Verma, said his daughter "grew up in a Democratic household.”

Verma 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.

Verma was vice president of the Health & Hospital Corporation of Marion County, and worked at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials in Washington, D.C.

Verma founded health policy consulting firm SVC, Inc. in June 2001.

She was president and CEO of the company, which worked with state insurance and public health agencies for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

SVC also assisted Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, and Kentucky, as well as other states, in the design of Medicaid expansion programs under the ACA.

In 2006, Verma’s team began pitching policies which would “provide government-funded health insurance to the working poor”.

She approached Gov. Mitch Daniels with a Medicaid alternative, featuring health savings accounts that required participants to contribute monthly, even if only a few dollars.

This proposal eventually became the Healthy Indiana Plan, which expanded coverage options to low-income individuals with employer-sponsored healthcare coverage.

In her work with Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, she developed Medicaid reform programs under the Section 1115 waiver process.

In 2014, significant ethics concerns were raised over a conflict of interest arising from Verma's dual roles as both a health care consultant for the State of Indiana and as an employee of a Hewlett-Packard division that is among Indiana's largest Medicaid vendors.

SVC, Inc. had been awarded over $6.6 million in contracts from the State of Indiana, while Verma was concurrently employed with Hewlett-Packard, earning her over $1 million during a period when the company had secured $500 million in State of Indiana contracts.

In 2016, her firm collected $316,000 for work done for the State of Kentucky as a subcontractor for Hewlett-Packard, according to documents obtained by the AP through public records requests.

Richard Painter, former President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer, called Verma’s arrangement a “conflict of interest” that “clearly should not happen and is definitely improper.” Ethics experts noted this conflicted with her public duties.

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, 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.

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.

She was supportive of President Trump signing into law legislation that permitted states to withhold federal funds from facilities that provide abortions.

Verma is a harsh 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.

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."

Politico reported that Verma clashed with HHS Secretary Alex Azar over which plans would replace Obamacare, who would get credit for those efforts, and Verma's attempts to accompany the President on Air Force One instead of Azar.

Verma accused Azar of sex discrimination; an inquiry by a former Trump HHS official, Heather Flick, concluded that Azar had not discriminated.

It was not the first clash Verma had with high-level officials.

Flick's inquiry reportedly said Verma had discussed with a lawyer a possible hostile work environment claim against then-HHS Secretary Tom Price; Verma denied she had done this.

The clashes extended to co-workers at CMS, as Verma was cited by her first Chief of Staff in an HHS investigative report as being "insecure" and someone who "lashes out" at subordinates.

Verma quickly assigned her next Chief of Staff to Baltimore, "shutting him out" of her inner circle in Washington.

Verma ultimately cycled through 5 Chiefs of Staff and 5 Medicaid directors during her term.