HCFA becomes CMS: A name to live up to

Can HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson do as good a job with reducing Medicare hassles as he did in finding a new name for HCFA?

Editorial. July 23, 2001.

Federal agencies have the reputation for seldom getting to the point in 1,000 words, so credit is certainly due to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson for artfully renaming the Health Care Financing Administration using only six: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

"Centers" borrows from the best-respected operation in Thompson's far-flung empire, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It adds the suggestion of an evidence-based approach to an agency that doctors have long viewed as arbitrary and oblivious to the reality of medical practice.

"Medicare and Medicaid" add clarity to the agency's former name. Those words also seem designed to reassuringly set boundaries on the scope of this operation -- no hint here of any interest in a wholesale revamping of the health care system (not that it was expected) as in the early days of the previous administration.

"Services," of course, is the crowd pleaser. Given some of the choices for the agency that our readers recently offered up in AMNews' Rename HCFA poll -- including some we couldn't print -- Thompson is right to believe that physicians are fed up with business as usual at the agency.

Some examples: Recent AMA congressional testimony cited an Association survey that found that more than a third of physicians queried spent an hour on Medicare paperwork or administrative demands for every one to four hours of patient care. The AMA called evaluation and management documentation "the most serious Medicare paperwork problem." The AMA also noted Medicare's 110,000-plus pages of rules and related documents as a sign of a program that is "needlessly complex and overly burdensome." (That testimony was in strong support of the hassle-busting, proposed Medicare Education and Regulatory Fairness Act.) An American Hospital Assn. survey revealed that doctors, nurses and other hospital staff spent, on average, at least a half-hour on paperwork for each hour of a typical Medicare patient's care. [...]