A new HHS health advisory committee met very briefly Monday to introduce its members and outline its broad goals for reshaping large parts of the healthcare system.
The Healthcare Advisory Committee, whose existence was announced on March 26, says on its website that its purpose is to "advise HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator [Mehmet Oz, MD, MBA] on ways to improve how care is financed and delivered across Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program [CHIP], and the [Affordable Care Act] Health Insurance Marketplace. The committee will provide non-binding recommendations to inform federal healthcare policy and program administration."
The committee's first meeting, which was livestreamed on Monday afternoon, was slated to run from 2:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Agenda items included committee member introductions, a bylaws discussion, presentations on the scope of the committee's six workgroups, and public comments. Despite the assertion by committee chair Clive Fields, MD, that "Our agenda is very full," the meeting lasted for only 30 minutes, mainly because several sections took much less time than they were allotted.
For example, the agenda allotted 30 minutes for committee members to introduce themselves, but it took only 11 minutes for 14 members to do so (Fields, the 15th member, did not say anything about himself). A 16th member, life coach Tony Robbins, did not appear at all, and a question sent to the chat asking whether he was still a committee member went unanswered.
