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Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

United States federal agency

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ5060058 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is a federal agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that administers the Medicare program and works in partnership with state governments to administer Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and health insurance portability standards. In addition to these programs, CMS has other responsibilities, including the administrative simplification standards from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), quality standards in long-term care facilities (more commonly referred to as nursing homes) through its survey and certification process, clinical laboratory quality standards under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, and oversight of HealthCare.gov.

CMS was previously known as the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) until 2001.

CMS actively inspects and reports on every nursing home in the United States. This includes maintaining the 5-Star Quality Rating System.

Organization

The agency carries out its responsibilities from its national headquarters located in Woodlawn, Maryland, and its 10 regional offices. It is organized around six centers to support its key functions. Numerous other offices throughout the agency support these centers.

The centers:

Center for Medicare (CM)

Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services (CMCS)

Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI, a.k.a. the CMS Innovation Center)

Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO)

Center for Program Integrity (CPI)

Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ)

The regions:

Workforce

CMS employs over 6,000 people, of whom about 4,000 are located at its headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland.

Editorial summary

“Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services” enters the record as united States federal agency. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Centers, Medicare and Medicaid can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1996, 2001—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1965. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Centers, Medicare and Medicaid.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Centers, Medicare and Medicaid provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5060058. VIAF identifies the subject as 167833234. The Library of Congress control number is no2001093385. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996 and 2001.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services primary sources, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services archive and Centers research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.