Audio of a Tuesday briefing with Seema Verma, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is being made available on the AHCJ website.
The May 1, 2018, briefing, called a “pen and pad” by CMS, allowed for only one reporter from each media outlet and was a chance for Verma to update reporters on Medicaid policy and ask questions.
Past briefings have included a limited number of reporters and no opportunity to record the proceedings, something AHCJ has protested. Members of the organization’s Right to Know Committee and leaders of its Washington, D.C., chapter made arrangements to record future CMS pen and pad briefings and make them available through healthjournalism.org.
AHCJ is making this recording available as a service to journalists and the public, but the organization continues to urge CMS to record the sessions and post them on the CMS website.
Right to Know Committee members who worked on the effort were Chair Felice J. Freyer, of The Boston Globe, and Vice Chair Sabriya Rice, of The Dallas Morning News. They collaborated with co-chairs of the D.C. chapter: Tina Reed, executive editor at FierceHealthcare; Erin Mershon, senior Washington correspondent at Stat; and Kimberly Leonard, senior health policy reporter at the Washington Examiner.
Download the MP3 recording here.
Previously:
- Verma participates in first of promised series of ’roundtables’ with reporters
- Reporters struggle to learn the facts after only three get briefing on drug price proposals
- AHCJ protests troubling incidents at HHS, calls on Azar to open the doors
