WASHINGTON — Seema Verma, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, defended the Trump administration’s healthcare policies and criticized the idea of Medicare for All during a public interview at an event Tuesday morning.
“The administration is often accused of sabotage,” said Verma. “We are making changes for the greater good.”
Verma insisted that no one wants to be using assistance and those on Medicaid need “incentives” to work and that the administration should focus on “giving people a pathway out of poverty.”
Verma also said Medicare for All would pull focus from seniors and is an “absolutely lousy idea”, citing a study saying it would cost the federal government $32 trillion.
Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, appeared on a panel immediately following Verma and disagreed with her claims.
“We need to have a system where everyone is in and no one is out,” said Benjamin.
Verma also defended Arkansas’ Medicaid work requirement program, which caused 4,000 people in the state to lose coverage, claiming that it helped lift people out of poverty by giving them “the skills they need and matching them with the jobs that are available.”
Though Arkansas is the first to administer such a program, three other states have applied for a waiver to do so.
Verma said the United States has a “great healthcare system” even though healthcare spending is “simply unsustainable” in her eyes. According to Verma, in 2026, 1 in every 5 dollars will be spent on healthcare. She claimed excessive regulation is the cause of the relatively high cost of healthcare in the US.
Medicare recently started covering tele-health costs for the first time, including Skype visits and sending photos to doctors, according to Verma.
Verma pledged to help modernize the health care records system, citing her husband’s recent health scare as further inspiration to do so.
The event, sponsored by the Atlantic and United Healthcare, took place at the Hotel Monaco and featured policy-makers, healthcare leaders and journalists speaking about inequality in the healthcare field.
Olga Kazan, an Atlantic journalist, cited the 20-year difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest neighborhoods in the country as one of the starkest examples of health inequity.
Elaine Batchlor, CEO of MLK Community Hospital in south LA spoke about turning the hospital around, providing better care for a community where 70 percent of people are on Medicaid. In one of the most unique changes, doctors now prescribe healthy food deliveries for patients with congestive heart failure.