Oh, please.
Every penny CMS pays out for a patient is somebody else's money, taken from them under threat through taxation.
It is right and necessary that taxpayers have some say in how their money is spent.
You are grossly mistaken if you think the bureaucrats in the swamp ever think of or care for the taxpayers. They don’t even give lip service to the taxpayers.
They do give lip service to the recipients of their programs. But lip service is all it is. In state government, maybe 1 in 100 bureaucrats ever really thinks about what is best for anyone except the bureaucrats and bureaucracy.
I suspect it is 1 in 1,000 in the Federal swamp.
And when the rare bureaucrat expresses something that would benefit the program recipient but hurt the bureaucracy, that person can expect to be ostracized and shunned
What is the ACA really about? Is it really about the poor uninsured? No way. It is about elitist knowing what is better for the rest of us than we do and then building a self-serving bureaucracy to control us and see how high we jump when they issue a change to a regulation.