Revolving Door 360
4 22 not quite sure how signif/ distinctive this is
THIS MAY JUST BECOME THREE
some have done multiple 360?
cooney returned to the mo ship emblematic?
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FT
:{:{Palantir’s ‘revolving door’ with government spurs huge growth Peter Thiel-chaired group has Washington and Westminster network that helped secure around $3bn in official contracts (L-R) Palantir chief executive Alex Karp, Palantir chair Peter Thiel, US President Donald Trump and US vice-president JD Vance © FT montage/Bloomberg/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union Palantir’s ‘revolving door’ with government spurs huge growth on x (opens in a new window) Palantir’s ‘revolving door’ with government spurs huge growth on facebook (opens in a new window) Palantir’s ‘revolving door’ with government spurs huge growth on linkedin (opens in a new window) Save current progress 0%}:
Tabby Kinder in San Francisco and Cynthia O’Murchu in London PublishedFEB 7 2025
Palantir is profiting from a “revolving door” of executives and officials passing between the $264bn data intelligence company and high level positions in Washington and Westminster, creating an influence network who have guided its extraordinary growth. }:
The US group, whose billionaire chair Peter Thiel has been a key backer of Donald Trump, has enjoyed an astonishing stock price rally on the back of strong rise of sales from government contracts and deals with the world’s largest corporations. Detailed findings by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), which analysed transparency disclosures and dozens of job moves, as well as US and UK public records obtained by the Financial Times, show how Palantir has hired extensively from government agencies critical to its sales. The analysis reveals the US group’s sprawling influence network which includes: deep ties with largest client, the Department of Defense; a six-fold increase in lobbying spending in the US in the past decade; and creating a non-profit foundation to fund academic research and shape policy discussions. Palantir has won more than $2.7bn in US contracts since 2009, including over $1.3bn in Pentagon contracts, according to federal records. In the UK, Palantir has been awarded more than £376mn in contracts, according to Tussell, a data provider.
Palantir declined to comment. The company’s executives “have their fingerprints all over the Trump transition and administration”, said Bill Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Silicon Valley used to say ‘we don’t have to lobby because we have a superior product’, but now it is all in on politics.” Palantir argues its data analysis products are in demand from clients including BP and Hertz due to their market-leading ability to analyse complex sets of information. Its technology is credited with helping kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, distributing Covid-19 vaccines and convicting financier Bernard Madoff. Palantir chief Alex Karp — an outspoken Democratic donor who backed Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris — said it would gain further windfalls from the new president’s expected focus on budget efficiency as well as higher spending on national security.
:{:{Its shares rose 340 per cent over the course of 2024, when it was the top performer in the S&P 500. Palantir’s top executives, Thiel and Karp, have earned over $1bn in share sales since Trump’s November election victory. “This is a revolution. Some people will get their heads cut off,” said Karp announcing stellar quarterly earnings on Monday that sent it stock to new highs. “We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.”}:
The revolving door
While Elon Musk has emerged as Trump’s biggest Silicon Valley booster, Thiel was the tech sector’s champion of the president during his first campaign in 2016. The investor also played a crucial role in the ascendancy of JD Vance, launching the new vice-president’s venture capital career before becoming the largest donor to his campaign for US senate in 2022. }:
Thiel threw a celebration party for Trump’s inauguration at his DC home last month, attended by Vance as well as Silicon Valley leaders like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. After the US election in November, Trump began tapping Palantir executives for key government roles. Jacob Helberg, senior adviser to Karp, was nominated as under secretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment, which would make him the top economic policy and trade official at the State Department. Meanwhile, Gregory Barbaccia, who worked at Palantir for a decade until 2020, was named federal chief information officer at the executive office of the President, overseeing the country’s $70bn IT budget. Palantir has also assembled former lawmakers and government officials from both Republican and Democrat backgrounds. In August, it recruited Mike Gallagher, an ex-Republican congressman who led the House Select Committee on China, to help identify contract opportunities.
He resigned from the House in April 2024 and under federal policy is banned from lobbying Congress for one year. In 2023, Palantir hired Geof Kahn, a former CIA veteran who worked on Trump’s 2016 transition team, and Jamie Fly, former foreign and national security adviser to Florida senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state. Since 2019, it has hired former senior defence and legal officials, such as Trump administration appointees Matthew Turpin and Alexander Alden, Obama-era staffer Wendy Anderson and ex-Biden assistant Funmi Olorunnipa Badejo. At least six individuals have moved between Palantir and the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), an office that oversees the defence department’s adoption of data, analytics and AI, according to the TTP. Meanwhile, Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder, has played a central role in setting up and staffing Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, a new advisory group seeking to cut swaths of the federal budget. A close ally of the Tesla chief, Lonsdale also helped establish and finance the pro-Trump America PAC, which became the vehicle through which Musk donated over $239mn to Trump’s campaign.
These sorts of moves allow companies like Palantir to gain “credibility on Capitol Hill,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, and help them “exert both direct and indirect influence on contracting and appropriations”. Hauser added: “Palantir is doing it because it has been proven over decades that the revolving door can help companies win more contracts.” Ramping up lobbying In October, Palantir hired the firm of one of Washington’s most prominent corporate lobbyists, Miller Strategies, to lobby on defence policy and appropriations, according to federal disclosures. The firm’s head, Jeff Miller, had established himself as the go-to lobbyist for influencing the Trump administration during the president’s first term in office. His other tech clients include SpaceX, Amazon and Apple.
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Palantir Technologies Inc
Palantir becomes a ‘Trump trade’ as investors bet on higher defence spending
:{:{ Overall, Palantir ramped up spending on lobbying last year to $5.8mn, up from around $1mn in 2015, according to federal disclosures. However, that compares to $12.3mn by Google, and $12.4mn and $8.8mn by traditional defence companies Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman respectively. Palantir has also backed the creation of a lobby trade group, the New American Industrial Alliance, which is advised by former Trump administration officials and aims to overhaul the Pentagon’s work with defence contractors.}:
It is also backed by Lonsdale’s 8VC venture firm. In 2023, it launched the Palantir Foundation for Defense Policy and International Affairs, which gained non-profit tax exempt status. The group said it is a “non-partisan organisation dedicated to advancing national security”, and was set up to influence policy discussions by funding academic research and hosting conferences. It publishes a journal called The Republic, with its first issue featuring an essay titled, ‘Don’t let copyright kill American AI’. Palantir has used a similar playbook in the UK. Its British business is overseen by Louis Mosley, a former activist in the Conservative party, while head of UK corporate affairs Ben Mascall was previously an adviser at the Ministry of Defence and the head of strategic communications at Downing Street. }:}:
:{:{Ahead of winning a contract worth up to £330mn with the NHS in November 2023 to help manage patient data, Palantir recruited two senior NHS officials specialising in AI and data, a move which raised concerns about the company’s growing ties to the health service. Palantir has also hired civil servants from departments including the UK’s Ministry of Defence and the Home Office, and forged other links with British government officials. It has used former high-level civil servants, such as former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers, to broker introductions to the UK government. }:
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Palantir’s relentless rise
The company has been a client of Global Counsel, the lobbying firm founded by Labour peer Peter Mandelson — the incoming British ambassador to the US. Lobbying expenditure data is not publicly available in the UK. Palantir attended at least 13 ministerial-level meetings between 2022 and 2023, but also extended hospitality such as drinks and dinners to senior officials such as Caroline Bellamy, the chief data officer at the Ministry of Defence where Palantir has a $75mn contract. }:}:
In January 2024, Thiel personally met Lord Dominic Johnson, then investment minister, to “develop a relationship”, according to documents released to the FT under transparency laws. Johnson planned to address concerns about the lack of access to the European marketplace by Palantir’s defence arm and pitch the UK as a “world-leading destination and incubator for venture philanthropy”, the documents show. According to heavily redacted meeting notes provided to the FT, Thiel expressed pessimism about the UK economy citing high taxes, low growth and “the fact that growth is driven by real estate rather than innovation like tech”.
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donald Francis McGahn II (/:{dɒn:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}::{ :(style="white-space:normal"):}::{məˈɡæn:(style="border-bottom:1px dotted"):}:/; born June 16, 1968) is an American lawyer who served as White House Counsel for U.S. President Donald Trump, from the day of Trump's inauguration through October 17, 2018, when McGahn resigned. Previously, McGahn served on the Federal Election Commission for over five years. In November 2019, McGahn received a court order to testify before the U.S House of Representatives. In August 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 7–2 that the House can sue him to comply.[1]
After leaving the FEC, McGahn returned to the law firm Patton Boggs.[16] In 2014 he moved to the law firm of Jones Day in Washington, D.C.[17] He also worked for the Koch affiliated Freedom Partners.[20] McGahn brought five Jones Day lawyers with him to the White House, and six more were appointed to senior posts in the Trump Administration.[21] Jones Day has represented Alfa-Bank and done work for businesses belonging to a long list of Russian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, and Alexander Mashkevich.[21]
Trump 2016 campaign[
McGahn served as Donald Trump's campaign counsel during his 2016 campaign for president.[16] McGahn managed all litigation involving Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential campaign. Early in 2016, he stopped efforts to keep Trump off of the Republican primary ballot in New Hampshire by going to court and winning to ensure ballot access in a key primary state.[22] Several weeks before the election, lawsuits were filed in four battleground states alleging voter intimidation and seeking to enjoin the Trump campaign from having observers at polling locations.[23] McGahn successfully managed and won these litigations.[24]
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Shortly after Trump was elected, he named McGahn General Counsel of the Presidential Transition Team. On November 25, 2016, McGahn was named White House Counsel for the President-elect's new administration.[25][26]
Since Jones Day has also represented the Trump campaign in its dealings with Robert Mueller, McGahn secured an ethics waiver that allows him to talk to his old firm when its clients have business before the U.S. government.[21]
McGahn assembled a team of lawyers to oversee filling all judicial vacancies. Guided by McGahn's team, President Trump had already appointed ten appellate judges by November 11, 2017, the most that early in a presidency since Richard Nixon.[30]McGahn personally recommended Trump nominate Neil Gorsuch to replace Antonin Scalia and Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Gorsuch's first official interview with Trump staff was on January 5, 2017 when McGahn met with him in Trump Tower. Trump and McGahn met with him on January 14, 2017. McGahn called Gorsuch on January 27, 2017 to tell him that he had been selected as the nominee.[27] Gorsuch was sworn in on Monday April 10, 2017.[28] McGahn also recommended the nomination of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta. Acosta was sworn in on April 28, 2017.[29]
According to The New York Times, McGahn conveyed instructions from President Trump to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, requesting Sessions not to recuse himself from overseeing investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election.[31] McGahn was unaware that Sessions had already consulted with career attorneys at the Department of Justice. When Sessions informed him he had already decided to recuse himself, McGahn ceased further discussion of the topic.[32] In response to this, Walter Shaub, former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics, said McGahn had "done much to undermine anticorruption mechanisms in this country." Shaub said, "It is a crime for a federal employee to participate in a particular matter in which he has a financial interest."[33]
In January 2018 The New York Times reported that in June 2017, the president asked McGahn to instruct top Justice Department officials to dismiss special counsel Robert Mueller, and that McGahn refused, instead threatening to resign.[34][35][36][37][38]
The New York Times reported on August 18, 2018 that McGahn had been cooperating extensively with the Special Counsel investigation for several months and that he and his lawyer had become concerned that Trump "had decided to let Mr. McGahn take the fall for decisions that could be construed as obstruction of justice, like the Comey firing, by telling the special counsel that he was only following shoddy legal advice from Mr. McGahn."[39]
On August 29, 2018, President Trump announced "McGahn will be leaving his position in the fall, shortly after the confirmation (hopefully) of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. I have worked with Don for a long time and truly appreciate his service!"[40][41] McGahn formally departed the Trump administration on October 17, 2018.[42]
In November 2018 it was reported that in spring 2018, Trump told McGahn that he wanted the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey. McGahn told Trump that he had no authority to order a prosecution and that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo to Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face possible impeachment.[43]
Don McGahn returned to Jones Day in March 2019 as the head of the firm's Government Regulation Practice.[44]
According to Mueller's final report, McGahn complained to White House chief of staff Reince Priebus that Trump was trying to get him to "do crazy shit." The president responded that McGahn was a "lying bastard."[45][46]
On May 7, 2019, the White House instructed McGahn not to comply with a subpoena issued by the House Judiciary Committee, instructing the Committee to redirect its records requests related to Mueller's investigation to the White House; McGahn is the most cited witness in the Mueller Report. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referenced the action as an obstruction of justice, stating during an event at Cornell University, "Trump is goading us to impeach him[.]"[47][48][49] A week later, it was reported that Trump's lawyers believed that McGahn told Mueller he did not believe Trump obstructed the investigation and ordered him not to provide any documents he had to the Judiciary Committee.[50] On May 21, 2019, McGahn defied a subpoena to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, at the direction of his former client.[51] On August 7, the House filed a lawsuit with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in an effort to challenge this precedent-setting move.[52]
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On November 25, 2019, U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson ruled that McGahn, who the Trump administration ordered not to cooperate with the investigation, must cooperate with the investigation and comply with a House of Representatives subpoena to testify.[53][54] The Justice Department requested a stay pending an appeal of the ruling, but on December 2, Jackson rejected the request, calling the DOJ's assertion that the House Judiciary Committee would not be harmed by a stay "disingenuous." Jackson wrote, "DOJ's argument here that any further delay will not be harmful to the Judiciary Committee because, in essence, DOJ has already harmed the Committee's interests by successfully delaying its access to other materials strikes this Court as an unacceptable mischaracterization of the injury at issue."[55]
McGahn is married to Shannon McGahn, a lobbyist[63] and former Counselor to Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin.[64][65] They have two sons.[16] He is a Roman Catholic.[66] McGahn has played guitar for more than 20 years and studied at Berklee College of Music. He plays lead guitar for an act called Scott's New Band.[67]
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an 12 24
Federal officials resolved more than a decade ago to crack down on whopping government overpayments to private Medicare Advantage health insurance plans, which were siphoning off billions of tax dollars every year.
But Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services officials have yet to demand any refunds — and over the years the private insurance plans have morphed into a politically potent juggernaut that has signed up more than 33 million seniors and is aggressively lobbying to stave off cuts.
Critics have watched with alarm as the industry has managed to deflate or deflect financial penalties and steadily gain clout in Washington through political contributions; television advertising, including a 2023 Super Bowl feature; and other activities, including mobilizing seniors. There’s also a revolving door, in which senior CMS personnel have cycled out of government to take jobs tied to the Medicare Advantage industry and then returned to the agency.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Medicare Advantage fraud “is wasting taxpayer dollars to the tune of billions.”
“The question is, what’s CMS doing about it? The agency must tighten up its controls and work with the Justice Department to prosecute and recover improper payments,” Grassley said in a statement to KFF Health News. “Clearly that’s not happening, at least to the extent it should be.”
David Lipschutz, an attorney with the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit public interest law firm, said policymakers have an unsettling history of yielding to industry pressure. “The health plans throw a temper tantrum and then CMS will back off,” he said.
Government spending on Medicare Advantage, which is dominated by big health insurance companies, is expected to hit $462 billion this year.
New details of the government’s failure to rein in Medicare Advantage overcharges are emerging from a Department of Justice civil fraud case filed in 2017 against UnitedHealth Group, the insurer with the most Medicare Advantage enrollees. The case is pending in Los Angeles. The DOJ has accused the giant insurer of cheating Medicare out of more than $2 billion by mining patient records to find additional diagnoses that added revenue while ignoring overcharges that might have reduced bills. The company denies the allegations and has filed a motion for summary judgment.
Records from the court case are surfacing as the Medicare Advantage industry ramps up spending on lobbying and public relations campaigns to counter mounting criticism.
While critics have argued for years that the health plans cost taxpayers too much, the industry also has come under fire more recently for allegedly scrimping on vital health care, even dumping hundreds of thousands of members whose health plans proved unprofitable.
“We recognize this is a critical moment for Medicare Advantage,” said Rebecca Buck, senior vice president of communications for the Better Medicare Alliance, which styles itself as “the leading voice for Medicare Advantage.”
Buck said initiatives aimed at slashing government payments may prompt health plans to cut vital services. “Seniors are saying loud and clear: They can’t afford policies that will make their health care more expensive,” she said. “We want to make sure Washington gets the message.”
AHIP, a trade group for health insurers, also has launched a “seven-figure” campaign to promote its view that Medicare Advantage provides “better care at a lower cost,” spokesperson Chris Bond said.
Revolving Door
CMS, the Baltimore-based agency that oversees Medicare, has long felt the sting of industry pressure to slow or otherwise stymie audits and other steps to reduce and recover overpayments. These issues often attract little public notice, even though they can put billions of tax dollars at risk.
In August, KFF Health News reported how CMS officials backed off a 2014 plan to discourage the health plans from overcharging amid an industry “uproar.” The rule would have required that insurers, when combing patients’ medical records to identify underpayments, also look for overcharges. Health plans have been paid billions of dollars through the data mining, known as “chart reviews,” according to the government.
The CMS press office declined to respond to written questions posed by KFF Health News. But in a statement, it called the agency a “good steward of taxpayer dollars” and said in part: “CMS will continue to ensure that the MA program offers robust and stable options for people with Medicare while strengthening payment accuracy so that taxpayer dollars are appropriately spent.”
Court records from the UnitedHealth case show that CMS efforts to tighten oversight stalled amid years of technical protests from the industry — such as arguing that audits to uncover overpayments were flawed and unfair.
In one case, Jeffrey Grant, a CMS official who had decamped for a job supporting Medicare Advantage plans, protested the audit formula to several of his former colleagues, according to a deposition he gave in 2018.
Grant has since returned to CMS and now is deputy director for operations at the agency’s Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. He declined to comment.
At least a dozen witnesses in the UnitedHealth case and a similar DOJ civil fraud case pending against Anthem are former ranking CMS officials who departed for jobs tied to the Medicare Advantage industry.
Marilyn Tavenner is one. She led the agency in 2014 when it backed off the overpayment regulation. She left in 2015 to head industry trade group AHIP, where she made more than $4.5 million during three years at the helm, according to Internal Revenue Service filings. Tavenner, who is a witness in the UnitedHealth case, had no comment.
And in October 2015, as CMS department chiefs were batting around ideas to crack down on billing abuses, including reinstating the 2014 regulation on data mining, the agency was led by Andy Slavitt, a former executive vice president of the Optum division of UnitedHealth Group. The DOJ fraud suit focuses on Optum’s data mining program.
In the legal proceedings, Slavitt is identified as a “key custodian regarding final decision making by CMS” on Medicare Advantage.
“I don’t have any awareness of that conversation,” Slavitt told KFF Health News in an email. Slavitt, who now helps run a health care venture capital firm, said that during his CMS tenure he “was recused from all matters related to UHG.”
‘Improper’ Payments
CMS officials first laid plans to curb escalating overpayments to the insurers more than a decade ago, according to documents filed in August in the UnitedHealth case.
In a January 2012 presentation, CMS officials estimated they had made $12.4 billion worth of “improper payments” to Medicare Advantage groups in 2009, mostly because the plans failed to document that patients had the conditions the government paid them to treat, according to the court documents.
As a remedy, CMS came up with an audit program that selected 30 plans annually, taking a sample of 201 patients from each. Medical coders checked to make sure patient files properly documented health conditions for which the plans had billed.
The 2011 audits found that five major Medicare Advantage chains failed to document from 12.3% to 25.8% of diagnoses, most commonly strokes, lung conditions, and heart disease.
UnitedHealth Group, which had the lowest rate of unconfirmed diagnoses, is the only company named in the CMS documents in the case file. The identities of the four other chains are blacked out in the audit records, which are marked as “privileged and confidential.”
In a May 2016 private briefing, CMS indicated that the health plans owed from $98 million to $163 million for 2011 depending on how the overpayment estimate was extrapolated, court records show.
But CMS still hasn’t collected any money. In a surprise action in late January 2023, CMS announced that it would settle for a fraction of the estimated overpayments and not impose major financial penalties until 2018 audits, which have yet to get underway. Exactly how much plans will end up paying back is unclear.
Richard Kronick, a former federal health policy researcher and a professor at the University of California-San Diego, said CMS has largely failed to rein in billions of dollars in Medicare Advantage overpayments.
“It is reasonable to think that pressure from the industry is part of the reason that CMS has not acted more aggressively,” Kronick said.
CMS records show that officials considered strengthening the audits in 2015, including by limiting health plans from conducting “home visits” to patients to capture new diagnosis codes. That didn’t happen, for reasons that aren’t clear from the filings.
In any case, audits for 2011 through 2015 “are not yet final and are subject to change,” CMS official Steven Ferraina stated in a July court affidavit.
“It’s galling to me that they haven’t recovered more than they have,” said Edward Baker, a whistleblower attorney who has studied the issue.
“The government needs to be more aggressive in oversight and enforcement of the industry,” he said.
Senior CMS official Cheri Rice recommended in the October 2015 email thread with key staff that CMS could devote more resources to supporting whistleblowers who report overbilling and fraud.
“We think the whistleblower activity could be as effective – or even more effective – than CMS audits in getting plans to do more to prevent and identify risk adjustment overpayments,” Rice wrote.
But the handful of cases that DOJ could realistically bring against insurers cannot substitute for CMS fiscal oversight, Baker said.
“Unfortunately, that makes it appear that fraud pays,” he said.
Spending Surge
In December, a bipartisan group of four U.S. senators, including Bill Cassidy (R-La.), wrote to CMS to voice their alarm about the overpayments and other problems. “It’s unclear why CMS hasn’t taken stronger action against overpayments, despite this being a longstanding issue,” Cassidy told KFF Health News by email.
In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called for CMS to crack down, including by restricting use of chart reviews and home visits, known as health risk assessments, to increase plan revenues.
Cassidy, a physician, said that “upcoding and abuses of chart review and health risk assessments are well-known problems CMS could address immediately.”
Advocates for Medicare Advantage plans, whose more than 33 million members comprise over half of people eligible for Medicare, worry that too much focus on payment issues could harm seniors. Their research shows most seniors are happy with the care they receive and that the plans typically cost them less out-of-pocket than traditional Medicare.
Buck, the spokesperson for the Better Medicare Alliance, said that as the annual open enrollment period starts in mid-October, seniors may see “fewer benefits and fewer plan choices.”
The group has ramped up total spending in recent years to keep that from happening, IRS filings show.
In 2022, the most recent year available, the Better Medicare Alliance reported expenses of $23.1 million, including more than $14 million on advertising and promotion, while in 2023, it paid for a featuring seniors in a bowling alley and left viewers with the message: Cutting Medicare Advantage was “nuts.”
Bruce Vladeck, who ran CMS’ predecessor agency from 1993 through 1997, said that when government officials first turned to Medicare managed care groups in the 1990s, they quickly saw health plans enlist members to help press their agenda.
“That is different from most other health care provider groups that lobby,” Vladeck said. “It’s a political weapon that Medicare Advantage plans have not been at all reluctant to use.”
The Better Medicare Alliance reported lobbying on 18 bills this year and last, according to OpenSecrets. Some are specific to Medicare Advantage, such as one requiring insurers to report more detailed data about treatments and services and another to expand the benefits they can offer, while others more broadly concern health care costs and services.
Proposed reforms aside, CMS appears to believe that getting rid of health plans that allegedly rip off Medicare could leave vulnerable seniors in the lurch.
Testifying on behalf of CMS in a May 2023 deposition in the UnitedHealth Group suit, former agency official Anne Hornsby said some seniors might not “find new providers easily.” Noting UnitedHealth Group is the single biggest Medicare Advantage contractor, she said CMS “is interested in protecting the continuity of care.”
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Ex-Trump solicitor general representing Chinese social media giant in ...
From 2017-2020, attorney Noel J. Francisco served as solicitor general during the first Trump Administration. Francisco went on to join a major law firm, Jones Day, after leaving the White House ...