Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Notable

Restore the Medicare Advantage Qualifying Payment Arrangement Incentive demonstration

Not started

464 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“The Medicare Advantage Qualifying Payment Arrangement Incentive (MAQI) demonstration; and”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The MAQI demonstration was not restored, and the negative is now bounded by the Innovation Center's own dated portfolio decision rather than by a search alone. On 2025-03-12 the Center published the one in-window fact sheet reviewing its whole model portfolio: it named five models to end early (Maryland Total Cost of Care, Primary Care First, ESRD Treatment Choices, Making Care Primary, and changes to Integrated Care for Kids), two announced-but-unimplemented models it would no longer pursue, and said its "other active models" would continue. MAQI appears in neither list, because it is not an active model — it ran once and was not revived, and the Center's stocktaking of what to start and stop passed over it. Moved nearby, not toward the ask. Federal Register full text for "Qualifying Payment Arrangement Incentive" and for "MAQI" since 2025-01-20 returns 0 documents each (re-run 2026-09-06), and the CMS Innovation Center's list of models (508 model pages in the cms.gov sitemap) has no MAQI page — only two archived MAQI fact-sheet PDFs from the demonstration's original run. Negative search recorded in `docs/research/ch-14.md` under the round-2 (ticket 16) cluster searches.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Queries: Federal Register API “Qualifying Payment Arrangement Incentive” since 2025-01-20 → 0 documents; “MAQI” → 0. The cms.gov sitemap (73 pages, 145,119 URLs, fetched 2026-08-28) contains priorities/innovation/files/x/maqi-factsheet.pdf and maqi-faqs.pdf but no live model page, i.e. the demonstration is not among the Innovation Center’s current models.
  • cms.gov, hhs.gov and medicaid.gov can all be read.
  • Correction, 2026-09-06. The premise that prompted this check said “cms.gov model pages carry no publication dates”. They do: every Innovation Center page carries a “Page Last Modified” stamp in its footer (the ACO REACH and LEAD pages both read 08/18/2026, the models index 03/16/2026, the June 2025 Innovation Insight 06/02/2025). The premise that forced #1256 and #1257 to use CMS prose rather than dated Evidence was false, and both items now carry Evidence.
  • HHS regulatory agenda, checked 2026-09-01. Checked against the full HHS agenda on reginfo.gov (183 active RINs in the 2026 Unified Agenda, published 2026-08-14), not the abbreviated version the Federal Register prints. The nearest entry is recorded here. It does not name this ask’s object, so the Status did not change: an agenda entry counts as an attempt only when it names what the ask asks for.
    • CMS has three payment-model entries — 0938-AV65 (Alternative Payment Model Updates and the Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Model, CMS-5544), 0938-AV91 (Alternative Payment Model, CMS-5548, NPRM 07/2026) and 0938-AV96 (Alternative Payment Model, CMS-5549, NPRM 10/2026). AV91 and AV96 are unnamed: each is “a new mandatory Medicare payment model under section 1115A”. “Qualifying Payment Arrangement Incentive” and “MAQI” return 0 across all 183 entries.
Action
reinstate
Object
Medicare Advantage Qualifying Payment Arrangement Incentive (MAQI) demonstration
ID
1256