How to use Verbatim

Getting started

Verbatim answers questions about the public rules behind a Medicare or Medicaid claim: the regulations, the correct-coding edits, what is covered, how a line is paid, and how a denial is handled. You ask in everyday language, the way you would ask a colleague.

Ask a good question

• Be specific about the situation: the service, the setting, and what you are trying to confirm. "Is there a frequency limit on this lab for a Medicare patient?" beats "lab rules."
• One question at a time gets the cleanest, most traceable answer.
• If you are working a denial, paste the situation and ask what the governing rule says and what the appeal path is.

Reading an answer

Every answer is built to be defensible, not just fast.

The citation is the point

Each answer carries a permanent, hash-verified citation tied to a snapshot of the source text at the moment it was retrieved. It does not move, rot, or quietly change, so the answer you relied on today still resolves to the exact text months later, in an appeal or an audit file.

Primary vs supplemental

Material drawn from the official primary rules is labeled as audit-grade. When a question reaches past those, an optional supplemental search brings back supporting background and labels it clearly as supplemental, so you always know which part of an answer is primary source and which is context.

A note on how to use it

Verbatim shows you what the rule says. It does not tell you what to do on a specific claim. Treat answers as a sourced reference to inform your own judgment, not as billing or legal advice.

What Verbatim covers, and what it does not

Carried Public federal Medicare and Medicaid sources that we have archived: Title 42 of the Code of Federal Regulations (current text) and Federal Register rules and notices from 2010 on; fourteen CMS manuals, including Claims Processing (all 39 chapters), Benefit Policy and Program Integrity; national coverage decisions, and local coverage decisions with their billing articles for every Medicare jurisdiction; transmittals, MLN articles, the correct-coding policy manual, edits and limits; and the 2026 fee schedules and code sets. For Medicaid: the federal rules, a claim filing deadline reference for all 50 states, and for New York, state audit protocols plus a first set of New York Medicaid Update articles.

Cited, not served Copyrighted works that your encoder or reference library already licenses: the CPT code descriptions (codes are cited by number only), the official UB-04 code tables, and the remittance code lists. Verbatim carries what CMS itself says about those codes, and does not reproduce the licensed lists.

Not covered: individual Medicare Advantage or commercial plan policies (we carry the federal rules those plans must follow, not each plan's own rules); state Medicaid manuals and fee schedules, other than the New York items above; earlier versions of a rule (regulations and manuals are the current text as we captured it in 2026, and fee schedules are 2026 only); and coding advice publications and nursing home survey guidance.

If a question falls outside this, Verbatim says so rather than guess, and offers a search of official .gov sources, clearly labeled as separate from our archive. See the full coverage page.

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