Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa today met with Seema Verma, the nominee of President-elect Donald Trump to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). As a senior member of the Finance Committee, Grassley will be involved in considering the nomination. He is reviewing drug price increases, especially involving EpiPens, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He made the following comment on the meeting.
“As part of the EpiPen inquiry, I learned that the Obama Administration knew in 2009 that EpiPens, along with Dilaudid and Prilosec, were misclassified under the Medicaid drug rebate program. That means the taxpayers overpaid for those drugs. For EpiPens alone, the taxpayers probably overpaid by hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s unclear whether the Obama Administration did anything to fix this problem for the taxpayers. The exact details are lacking because CMS, the Justice Department and the EpiPen maker Mylan refused to testify voluntarily at a hearing I scheduled on this problem. Further, the Justice Department, CMS and Mylan have failed to respond in full to my oversight letters. This is unacceptable. A new administration offers an opportunity to exert more oversight of government programs and tax dollars. This agency’s job is to deliver services to patients and get the most value from every tax dollar. It has to carry out the programs and services enacted into law by Congress and the President. It ought to be responsive to Congress, the people’s branch of government. The EpiPen misclassification is a case study in what not to do. I expressed these sentiments to Ms. Verma, and she agreed. I look forward to exploring these ideas further at her nomination hearing.”
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