For Immediate Release                                             Contact: Toby S. Edelman

June 18, 2008                                                                            Senior Policy Attorney

                                                                                                  (202) 293-5760

The Center for Medicare Advocacy (the Center) supports efforts by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to provide consumers with more and better information about nursing home quality, but it questions the plan announced by CMS on June 18, 2008 to rank nursing homes on the CMS website Nursing Home Compare.

"Two of the three criteria that CMS plans to use – quality measures and staffing data – are self-reported by nursing facilities and are inaccurate," said Toby S. Edelman, Senior Policy Attorney with the Center for Medicare Advocacy.   "Too often, nursing facilities report that residents are doing much better than they really are and that they have more staff than they really have.  Relying on nursing homes to describe accurately how well they are doing – and reporting that information as fact – just doesn’t make sense."

The Center encourages CMS to provide more information to the public but to delay reporting facilities' ranks until there are systems in place that assure that facility-reported data are accurate.

Recent reports supporting the Center's position are available by contacting Toby Edelman (mailto:tedelman@medicareadvocacy.org).