Grassley Wants Answers on ‘Lavish’ Travel by CMS Employees

WASHINGTON–Amidst concerns about extravagant conferences and
travel by quality improvement organization (QIO) staff and other
officials of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Senate
Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley is demanding more
information about the agency’s expenses.

In a letter to CMS Administrator Mark McClellan, Grassley
requested “a detailed accounting” of the funding and costs for
conferences and other travel meetings attended by CMS or QIO staff
members in the last four years.

According to Grassley, R-Iowa, photographs of an annual QIO
conference at the Don CeSar Beach Resort near St. Petersburg, Fla.,
“depict a luxurious resort, lavish dinners, dessert buffets and
Hawaiian dance parties–all in a tropical beach locale.

“As you look at the photos of the Don CeSar event, you wonder if
these contractors are going to luaus and playing golf instead of
investigating patient complaints about poor Medicaid quality,”
Grassley said. “And then you have to wonder whether the federal
employees who are supposed to make sure the contractors are doing
the job we pay them to do are instead going to luaus and playing
golf themselves.”

Calling the notion of a lavish retreat “completely wrongheaded,”
Greg Simmons, a member of the planning committee for the 2005
meeting and CEO of Madison, Wis.-based Metastar, the Wisconsin QIO,
said the pictures show a celebration largely funded by the hotel to
commemorate the long-standing relationship between the resort and
the conference.