Camber Health paid McDermott+ $100,000 over six months to lobby on Medicaid fraud and reimbursement. The registration ended when the firm closed its practice.
Key Takeaways
- The registration ended because the firm closed: Camber Health’s federal lobbying registration terminated on August 31, 2026, the same day McDermott+ closed its lobbying practice. Co-Founder Nathan Lee told Acuity the contract expired as a byproduct of that closure, and Politico Pro and Holland & Knight both place the firm’s exit on the same date.
- The registered subject matter was Medicaid fraud and reimbursement: All three quarterly reports carry an identical description of the work: issues relating to Medicaid fraud initiatives and Medicaid reimbursement. Disclosed contacts ran to the U.S. House of Representatives and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with no Senate contact reported in any quarter.
- The enforcement backdrop is the sharpest the sector has faced: CMS reported in August that spending on applied behavior analysis across Medicaid and CHIP grew 421 percent between 2021 and 2025. Federal auditors have separately flagged roughly $198 million in improper ABA payments across four states, with another $410 million classified as potentially improper.
- The disclosure record stays incomplete until late fall: Third-quarter reports are not due until October 20, and any replacement registration would not have to surface until 45 days after a new firm is retained. Whether Camber rebuilds a federal presence cannot be answered from the public record yet.
Camber Health’s federal lobbying registration ended on August 31, 2026, for an ordinary reason: the firm it had retained closed its lobbying practice that day.
The paperwork is brief. On Friday, August 28, Katie Waldo digitally signed a quarterly report on behalf of McDermott+ LLC, the health policy and lobbying affiliate of the law firm McDermott Will & Schulte. Line 10, Termination Report, was checked, with a termination date of August 31. Line 12 reported $30,000 in income for the quarter. Across the full engagement, which began in March, Camber Health paid the firm $100,000 to lobby on Medicaid fraud and reimbursement.
August 31 was a Monday, and it was the day McDermott+ closed its lobbying practice, according to Politico Pro. Holland & Knight announced that same day that Kristen O’Brien, a Principal at McDermott+, and Jeffrey Davis, a Senior Director there, had joined its Federal Government Affairs Practice in Washington. Law360 had reported three days earlier that McDermott Will & Schulte was closing its healthcare lobbying and consulting operation after a dozen years in business. LegiStorm now lists the registrant as no longer existing. The firm filed terminations across its client roster through the summer, and the Camber Health report is one of them.
Camber described the ending in the same terms. Nathan Lee, Co-Founder of the company, said the contract expired as a byproduct of the firm’s closure and that Camber did not end the relationship early. In a statement to Acuity, he said: “Given how quickly the regulatory environment is changing, we at Camber care deeply about partnering with subject matter experts to stay informed so we can best serve our clinic partners. We’re grateful for the partnership we had with McDermott+ before they closed.”
The company is not a marginal player in applied behavior analysis. Acuity profiled Camber in March, when Lee described a revenue cycle platform processing more than $2.5 billion in annual claims for roughly 90,000 patients across 42 states. Camber emerged from stealth in early 2025 with $50 million raised, a $30 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz having closed that February. Its customer base sits in exactly the service lines now under federal scrutiny, which is what makes the registration worth reading even though its ending was unremarkable.
What the Camber Health Lobbying Disclosures Show
The engagement was short. McDermott+ registered Camber Health as a client with an effective date of March 9, 2026, filing the registration the following month. Fees ran $20,000 in the first quarter, $50,000 in the second, and $30,000 in the partial third quarter that ended with the termination. The total across the relationship was exactly $100,000, and it lasted a little under six months.
The registration describes the client in five words: a “Medicaid revenue cycle management organization.” That is a narrower self-description than the one Camber uses publicly, where it presents itself as revenue cycle infrastructure for specialty care spanning applied behavior analysis, speech language pathology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and adjacent fields. The registrant described its own business in two words: “consulting firm.”
Every filing lists the same general issue area code, MMM, for Medicare and Medicaid, and the same one-line description of the work: “Issues relating to Medicaid fraud initiatives and Medicaid reimbursement.” The wording does not change across three quarters.
The disclosed contacts do shift. The first-quarter report lists lobbying contacts with the U.S. House of Representatives alone. The second and third quarters add the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. No filing reports a Senate contact in any quarter, which is worth noting given the composition of the team.
Five registered lobbyists worked the account: Rodney Whitlock, Debbie Curtis, Katie Waldo, Madalyn News, and Erin Fuller. Two carry substantial disclosed government records. Whitlock served as Health Policy Director for Senator Chuck Grassley from 2011 to 2015 and as Health Policy Advisor to the Senate Finance Committee from 2005 to 2010, after eight years with Representative Charlie Norwood. Curtis spent 1998 to 2013 as Legislative Director and then Chief of Staff to Representative Pete Stark, serving jointly as Professional Staff on the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee.
The rest of the roster is lighter than the first two names suggest. Waldo, who served as the contact and signatory on all four filings, has no covered government position disclosed. News and Fuller each list a single entry: a 2020 paid internship, with Representative Madeleine Dean and Senator Elissa Slotkin respectively. The filings report no affiliated organizations, no foreign entities, and no convictions, and the termination report delists no one.
Why the McDermott+ Closure Ended the Camber Health Registration
McDermott+ was an unusual operation. Launched in April 2014 as an affiliate of what was then McDermott Will & Emery, it combined health policy consulting, reimbursement strategy, data analytics, and conventional lobbying under one roof, serving health industry clients exclusively. Alongside the client work it ran a substantial publishing arm, including a weekly Washington health policy summary, a podcast, regulatory commentary, and Medicare payment dashboards. Whitlock, Curtis, and Fuller appeared together on that podcast as recently as this year.
Camber Health was a small account inside it. Big Health Inc., a digital therapeutics company that had paid the firm $470,000 since 2020, was terminated in the same late-August window. Accounts of every size ended at once, which is what a wind-down looks like in the disclosure record.
None of which indicates what Camber will do next. A closure of this kind typically scatters a client book, and the disclosure system will not show where quickly. Third-quarter reports are not due until October 20. A new registration is required no later than 45 days after a lobbyist is retained or first makes a contact. A company that hires replacement counsel in September could, entirely properly, remain invisible in the public record until late in the fall.
Medicaid Fraud Initiatives and Reimbursement: The Issues Camber Health Registered to Lobby
The two registered issues are not abstractions in this sector. They are the defining conditions of it, and the registration period sits inside the busiest stretch of federal ABA activity on record.
On August 4, CMS released a 173-page toolkit for state Medicaid and CHIP agencies, reporting that ABA spending grew 421 percent between 2021 and 2025, far outpacing the 67 percent growth in the number of children with an autism diagnosis receiving services. The underlying toolkit document puts the dollar figures at roughly $1.94 billion rising to $10.1 billion. CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said families deserve confidence that ABA services are “clinically appropriate, personalized, and delivered by qualified providers.” The agency framed the release as a program integrity measure and said it creates no new federal requirements.
The audit record ran ahead of it. The HHS Office of Inspector General has published four state audits of Medicaid ABA payments in a planned series of seven, covering Indiana, Wisconsin, Maine, and Colorado, and has recommended more than $123 million in federal refunds. In each of the four, every one of the 100 sampled enrollee-months contained at least one improper or potentially improper claim. The findings turned overwhelmingly on documentation rather than intent: session notes that did not substantiate the time billed, codes that did not match the activity described, missing credentials, absent signatures.
States moved on their own timelines. Indiana rewrote its ABA rules in bulletin BT202627, pairing a phased rate reduction with a 4,000-hour lifetime cap on comprehensive therapy. Florida seated an ABA Task Force in August with a December 31 reporting deadline, after agency staff presented a $6.57 billion spending figure covering 2023 through 2025. In Georgia, Amerigroup notified providers of a reimbursement reduction under a clause treating silence as acceptance. Enforcement reached individual companies too: Oklahoma suspended one provider’s Medicaid payments over a credible allegation of fraud, then waited 207 days to send notice.
Provider organizations have argued throughout that rate reductions are the wrong instrument for a documentation problem. In interviews with Acuity in July, clinical and policy leaders made the case that rate cuts do not address fraud and may worsen it, since organizations investing in supervision and documentation run on thin margins while bad actors face no such constraint. The alternative they describe runs through data: outlier analysis, billing-pattern review, post-payment sampling. That is infrastructure work, and it is the sort of work a claims platform is built to do.
The federal statutory picture is also still unfolding. The budget reconciliation law enacted July 4, 2025 as Public Law 119-21, commonly called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, made substantial changes to Medicaid financing and eligibility. CMS issued an interim final rule implementing portions of it on June 1, 2026, and states must implement work requirements for certain enrollees by December 31, 2026. Implementation of that scale generates a long tail of regulatory decisions, and companies whose revenue depends on those decisions have reason to want someone in the room.
What ABA Operators Should Take From the Camber Health Lobbying Record
The filings describe a short and unremarkable engagement. A vendor retained a specialist firm during a period of intense federal activity on Medicaid payment and program integrity, spent $100,000 over roughly six months, directed the work at the House and at CMS, and lost the relationship when the firm wound down. Lee’s account and the public record agree on that sequence, and the record shows no more than it.
What the filings do offer is a dated window into how the infrastructure layer of this industry engages Washington. Providers file comments and hire state lobbyists, and that activity is familiar. The billing platforms, practice management systems, and analytics vendors sitting underneath thousands of clinics are less often observed doing the same thing, and their interests are not identical to their customers’. A rate reduction changes a provider’s margin. A documentation standard changes what a claims engine has to verify before submission. Acuity has reported on how much of that verification burden still runs on phone calls rather than electronic transactions. Both interests land in the same disclosure category, and only one of them is usually described in public.
For operators, the useful part is the timing rather than the ending. The October 20 filing deadline will show what the third quarter held across the sector, and any successor registrations will surface in the weeks after. Until then, the record shows a Washington channel that opened in March, ran through the House and CMS for two quarters, and closed on August 31 along with the firm that held it.
