The CMS advisory committee drop: 18 people, one agenda, and a bunch of subtext
Abstract
March 26, 2026. HHS and CMS dropped the member list for a new federal Healthcare Advisory Committee. 18 people. Picked from 400+ nominees. Reporting to RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz. Non-binding recommendations across Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the Marketplace. The five stated priorities: chronic disease, outcomes accountability, real-time data, vulnerable populations, and Medicare Advantage sustainability. The roster mixes major health system operators (Cleveland Clinic, Sanford, Intermountain), value-based care builders (VillageMD), health IT infrastructure (Availity), community health (NACHC), and Tony Robbins. Yes that Tony Robbins. This piece covers:
- Who these people are and why the mix is interesting
- The five priority buckets and where the money follows
- Medicare Advantage as the thing everyone should actually be watching
- Real-time data as an infrastructure thesis hiding in plain sight
- MAHA as a policy direction with real market consequences
- Whether any of this matters given it’s technically advisory and non-binding
Table of Contents
The Roster and What It Signals
Breaking Down the Five Priorities
Medicare Advantage Is the Real Story
The Data Infrastructure Play
MAHA Is a Market Signal Whether You Like It or Not
Non-Binding Doesn’t Mean Irrelevant
The Roster and What It Signals
Skip the quotes in the press release. Every federal advisory committee announcement produces the same sentences about practical solutions and putting patients first. It’s not that anyone is lying, it’s just that the quotes are written to be unobjectionable and therefore contain approximately zero information. What contains information is who they actually put in the room.
The health system operators are the first thing worth looking at. Bill Gassen runs Sanford Health, which is one of the largest rural health systems in the country, operating primarily across the Dakotas and upper Midwest with a footprint that touches communities most coastal health tech companies have never thought about. Dennis Laraway is the CFO of Cleveland Clinic, which runs some of the tightest financial operations of any major academic medical center in the country and has been aggressive about data infrastructure and cost management in ways that a lot of comparable systems haven’t matched. Dan Liljenquist is EVP and Chief Strategy Officer at Intermountain Health, former Utah state senator, former Bain consultant, and the person who quite literally invented Civica Rx, a nonprofit generic drug manufacturer he dreamed up while on a treadmill and then actually built into a real company that now has a domestic manufacturing facility coming online in Virginia. That particular combination of policy brain, strategy chops, and willingness to build new institutions outside existing incentive structures is pretty unusual and his presence on this committee is not decorative.
Then there is Clive Fields, who co-founded VillageMD and has spent years building out the primary care infrastructure thesis that Walgreens eventually paid several billion dollars for before the whole thing got complicated. His background is squarely in value-based primary care at scale and he has thought harder than most people about what physician enablement actually requires operationally. Russ Thomas is the CEO of Availity, which is the largest health information network in the country by transaction volume and sits in the pipes connecting payers and providers at a level most people in digital health don’t fully appreciate. If the committee is serious about real-time data and administrative simplification, having the person who runs that particular piece of infrastructure at the table is not an accident.
Kyu Rhee has one of the more interesting career arcs on the list. Former CMO at HHS, former Chief Health Officer at IBM Watson Health during the period when Watson was supposed to transform everything, former SVP and CMO at CVS Health’s Aetna business, and now President and CEO of the National Association of Community Health Centers, which represents 1,512 federally qualified health centers serving roughly 52 million patients. His presence reads as the committee’s anchor on the vulnerable populations priority and also brings a track record of having worked at the intersection of data, AI, and clinical delivery at a point in time when that intersection was still being figured out. Jenni Gudapati holds a PhD and has been involved in value-based care and population health in ways that complement the clinical operator voices elsewhere on the list.
The two ex officio members, Kimberly Brandt and Stephanie Carlton, are the government insiders keeping the committee connected to actual CMS operations. Brandt in particular has deep background in Medicare oversight and program integrity going back to prior CMS leadership roles, which matters when the agenda includes anything touching fraud reduction or quality measurement integrity.
And then there is Tony Robbins. Look, the honest reaction from most people in health policy circles was somewhere between confusion and amusement. He is a motivational speaker and self-help figure who recently appeared at a CMS quality conference and apparently made enough of an impression on Dr. Oz to land a seat at this table. The charitable read is that he brings a consumer behavior and behavior change lens that is genuinely missing from most policy conversations. The less charitable read is that this is an administration that likes names people recognize. Both things can be true. Either way he is one vote among eighteen and the committee’s output will be shaped by the operators and clinicians, not by the person famous for walking on hot coals.
Breaking Down the Five Priorities
