News Article

Consumer Voice Sends Letter to CMS Regarding Inaccuracies on Care Compare

May 04, 2023

Consumer Voice sent a letter to Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), regarding the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General's (OIG) report which found widespread inaccuracies in the information reported to the public on Care Compare. Nearly 20 years ago, the Inspector General identified many of these same inaccuracies in a report on Nursing Home Compare, Care Compare’s predecessor website. Although CMS promised two decades ago to correct the problems that led to the inaccuracies (and to require state agencies to verify that the database includes the most recent inspections), the same problems remain today, based on the same underlying causes.

More troubling still, CMS now dismisses OIG’s detailed concerns about how Care Compare fails to identify health, life safety code, and emergency preparedness deficiencies for two-thirds of the nursing facilities in the country. CMS refuses to commit to correcting the problems that make Care Compare understate deficiencies so significantly and extensively. In our letter, we urge CMS to take the findings of the OIG report seriously, to adopt all of the report’s recommendations, and to undertake a system-wide review to determine how these serious errors were made.

Read our letter.