Just got the email from CMS that they are planning to discontinue physical access to the Medicare/Medicaid research files and force everyone to use the (incredibly expensive) VRDC. In the transition, they'll charge physical data users $10K/year to renew DUAs. This is bad.

This is a nightmare for researchers and a total own-goal for good health policy. Policy announcement is here: www.cms.gov/data-researc...