The DOGE Czar’s Plan to Loot Medicare

Brad Smith was running an off-the-books laboratory created by the Affordable Care Act for experimenting with “alternative payment models” In its ten years of operation, CMMI had spent more than $10 billion testing various methods of tweaking reimbursement standards in (theoretical) hopes of improving health care outcomes for lower costs.

The Maryland model saved CMS $1 billion over just five years tracked by CMMI .

But the Maryland system saved CMS over five years , likely in large part by lacking the administrative middlemen and arbitrageurs in the system and the waste and fraud that tend to accompany them.

In one of his last acts at the agency, Smith introduced a new program called the Geographic Direct Contracting Model , or Geo ’.

Steve Smith and Steve Davis are said to be the real operating leaders of DOGE , with the latter playing the bad cop masterminding the scorched-earth shutdowns and cuts.

CMMI, a highly unusual agency with a ten-year , self-renewing budget outside the appropriations process, is a model for how Musk wants to reimagine the federal government.

Smith and a 24-year-old deputy from his Nashville VC firm, a source familiar with his recruiting efforts, say sources.