Public Affairs

Public Affairs is at the heart of CMS’ value to physicians. This department advocates for physicians’ interests at the state capitol and in Washington. We work proactively on legislation to improve your practice environment, while fighting against measures that would raise your costs and make it harder for you to provide high-quality, compassionate care to your patients.

Our Public Affairs teams works on dozens of issues at the state capitol every year. Here are just a few of CMS’ notable achievements at the state capitol over the last five years:

Managed Care Reforms
• Passed first-in-the-nation legislation to standardize health plan contracts.
• Passed groundbreaking legislation allowing physicians to review and appeal the methodology behind commercial health and workers compensation carriers’ physician ratings systems.
• Passed a key administrative simplification bill requiring health plans to standardize their claims edits.

Patient Safety and Professional Liability
• Beat back attempts to destabilize Colorado’s medical liability environment.
• Introduced landmark patient safety legislation to begin the process of moving Colorado away from fault-based liability and give injured patients alternatives for dealing with medical error.

Access to Care
• Successfully lobbied to increase primary care reimbursements rates in the Medicaid program to 95% of Medicare rates.
• Supported legislation that increases access to care by increasing Medicaid and CHP+ eligibility levels without draining general fund dollars.

Public Health
• Supported efforts to expand physical education classes and healthy lunch choices in schools to address the growing childhood obesity epidemic.

To learn more about CMS’ Public Affairs activities or sign up for our ASAP alerts, contact:

Susan Koontz, General Counsel and Director of Government Relations
(720) 858-6327
susan_koontz@cms.org