GOP senators question industry ties of Obama health official

Two Republican senators are warning about a possible conflict of interest for a top Obama administration health official who used to be an executive at a contractor for HealthCare.gov. 

Sens. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Mathews Burwell in a letter released Wednesday, raising concerns about Andy Slavitt, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). 

Before being hired by CMS in June 2014, Slavitt was an executive at Optum, which owns QSSI, a contractor that works as “senior adviser” to CMS on the federal ObamaCare website.

The senators said it is troubling that Slavitt now makes decisions at CMS that affect contractors where he used to work.

{mosads}In addition, Optum and QSSI are both part of UnitedHealth Group, whose insurance arm also offers coverage on the ObamaCare marketplaces. The senators said they fear contracting work on the marketplaces could give an unfair benefit to the insurance arm of the company. 

Grassley and Hatch have raised these concerns before, but are renewing them now that Slavitt has moved up from deputy administrator to acting administrator at CMS. 

“The multiple relationships between Mr. Slavitt and United subsidiaries raise real concerns about how, and to what extent, CMS has prevented conflicts of interest given the fact CMS makes decisions that impact United and its subsidiaries every day,” the senators write. “While Mr. Slavitt may have recused himself from such decisions in the past, it may be difficult or impossible for him to do so in his current position at CMS.”

A CMS spokesman said the agency is reviewing the letter and referred The Hill to an ethics waiver that Slavitt signed when he joined the agency in June.

The waiver allows Slavitt to be involved in some matters relating to his former employer, but also sets limits.

It prevents him, for example, from being involved in awarding new contracts or performance bonuses to QSSI.

Aaron Albright, the CMS spokesman, said Slavitt has severed “all financial ties with his former employer, which allows him to execute his duties and participate in broad policy matters.  … With limited exceptions as specified in the document, he is recused from participation in specific party matters, such as contracts or claims, involving his former employer.”

Albright stressed that Slavitt was “integral to both the relaunch of HealthCare.gov and this year’s successful second open enrollment” period for ObamaCare.

In February, CMS wrote a letter to Hatch responding to the senator’s concerns about the other potential conflict of interest, between the insurance and website contracting arms of United Health. 

The letter says that the agency has a “mitigation strategy” against conflicts of interest from QSSI. “We thereby limited QSSI involvement to areas where it would not provide subjective judgment, advice or recommendations on work in which it has a financial interest, including State-based Marketplace projects,” the letter states.

It says workers who receive private information about the marketplaces cannot be transferred to a sister company.

In the letter released Wednesday, however, the senators say this response from CMS was “largely unresponsive and did not provide sufficient information to relieve our concerns.”

The senators are asking for all documents, including emails, related to evaluations of conflicts of interest Slavitt might have. They also ask for all of the instances of Slavitt recusing himself since June, and any exemptions he has received. 

They ask for the response by April 8. 

— Updated at 6:58 p.m.