A cookie is a small piece of information that is sent to your browser—along with a Web page—when you access a Web site. There are two kinds of cookies. A session cookie is a line of text that is stored temporarily in your computer's memory. Because a session cookie is never written to a drive, it is destroyed as soon as you close your browser. A persistent cookie is a more permanent line of text that gets saved by your browser to a file on your hard drive.

• CMS uses session cookies only. We do not use any persistent cookies.
• CMS's Use of Cookies. You do not need to have cookies enabled to visit cms.hhs.gov and medicare.gov.
• Cookies are used to remember your "screen reader" viewing preference on medicare.gov. If you do not have cookies enabled, you will have to choose "Screen Reader Version" on every page you visit. If you do have cookies enabled, your preference will be saved for the entire visit to the site. This preference will not be saved between site visits, however. We have set our software so that your browser will return cookie information only to the domain where the cookie originated (in this case, cms.hhs.gov or medicare.gov). No other site can request it. Note: Regardless of the particular uses for cookies on CMS Web sites, we will share no cookie information with third parties.