Due to a lack of members present at a Senate Finance Committee executive session Wednesday, the committee will reconvene Thursday to vote again on the candidacy of Seema Verma for CMS administrator.
Senators present at the meeting voted 9-9 on the nomination, and the final tally with proxies was 15-11 to confirm Ms. Verma as CMS administrator. However, because proxies do not count, the committee must vote again before they can send her nomination to the full Senate for a final vote. The full committee has 26 members, 14 Republican and 12 Democrat.
Ms. Verma is the president, CEO and founder of a national health policy consulting company called SVC. She is known for her work in crafting the Healthy Indiana Plan, the state's version of Medicaid expansion, which was created under a waiver from the Obama administration.
"I think she is a highly qualified nominee. I really don't think there's anyone who reasonably doubts that," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the finance committee. Despite the delay, Ms. Verma is notably less divisive than HHS Secretary Tom Price, whose nomination vote was boycotted by finance committee Democrats and ultimately pushed through by Republicans under suspended rules.
However, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the Democratic ranking member, delivered a statement of concern Wednesday over how Ms. Verma handled questions from the committee, which he said were not "gotcha questions." Sen. Wyden said he opposed Ms. Verma's nomination because her answers were too vague.
"What we got is what I'm starting to call healthcare happy-talk because there's just no content there. That's deeply troubling for me when you are talking about a job that's responsible for a trillion dollars of healthcare spending," Sen. Wyden said.
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