DR. MOORE: Good morning. We have a long agenda today, so I'd like to get started on time.
My name is Bob Moore. I'm with the Health Care Financing Administration. This is something that we -- this meeting we thought about back in the spring, and it serves a number of purposes. When we thought about it, we didn't put out special invitations to a lot of people, but we did spread the word to as many people as we could, because we wanted to use it, as I said, one, to get with the general public about what we were doing before we did it, and also to give ourselves some milestones or some targets to shoot for, and this seemed like a good one.
We made a presentation to the assistant secretaries in the department back in June, letting them know what we were thinking about, what the recommendations might be, what the rationale for where the teams had reached. At this time, we wanted to make the general public aware of where we were. It gave us targets to shoot for, some milestones to reach.
As we go through today, I'm going to go through an overview this morning of -- I know some of you, I have seen some of you, I have made presentations to some of you in the past. Some of the material that I will cover may be seen by some of you, like Frank or some of the others, but I am going to do it again to tell you how we arrived or what the structure was within the department to achieve where we are. Then we will bring up each of the teams that worked on these standards, and they will go over with you individually where they are, what they are likely to recommend, and I say likely because nothing is absolutely certain until it gets out the door, and it is not out the door yet. In fact, a lot of it isn't even written yet, but a lot of work has been done to lay the ground, to write the regs, to put it together to get out this fall.
Many of you know, I was tapped to be on this with Dr. Braithwaithe. Bill is not with us today, but we are co-chairing a group that is leading this effort. I will be moving on to another job within the agency, and someone is going to be picked to take my place, working with Bill on this. That is to be done later this month. I have been told that I will spend as much time as is necessary to make sure that my replacement is as successful as I have been.
The person that I work for that is in the agency on standards is Stuart Streimer. Stuart, would you stand up so that everyone can see who you are? He is here to make sure that I do it right today.
I want to cover the general provisions. This will be transcribed, and this transcription will be available to everyone, including the overheads that we use. So if you want to know all the detail as the day goes through, we can make it painfully available to you.
The teams will be taking about 20 minutes in each of their presentations, and then opening it up for questions, and we will spend the rest of the hour for questions. So let's get started.