The Heart of Persuasion

Though he stopped lobbying officially years ago, Randy Wolfe is still a tireless advocate for the home care industry. “My family was worried that I would miss Christmas,” he laughs, explaining that the holidays found him calling and writing legislators about a last-minute provision to the federal budget bill that would cut oxygen reimbursement. “It seems like every week some issue like this comes up, so I guess I am still involved.”

Having chaired several committees for both national and state associations in addition to his work in the 1980s as a registered lobbyist for the industry, Wolfe, a recipient of HomeCare magazine's 2005 HomeCaring Award, is no stranger to the political scene. But his business experience is equally extensive: Since 1976, the year he joined Knoxville, Tenn.-based Lambert's Health Care — which he purchased 13 years later and still owns today — Wolfe has participated in the start-up of eight different HME operations in the Southeast and Texas and has helped develop five different hospital joint ventures in Tennessee.

But, ultimately, Wolfe is driven by more than financial goals. “It's now no longer just the business, just making money and the challenge of doing our work every day,” he says. Instead, it's making legislators aware of the needs of seniors who would rather stay in their own homes than live in a nursing home.

“We've talked about and understood the value of home care all of our career lives, but lately it's become apparent that we really need to be speaking up for these people,” Wolfe says, “because it doesn't seem like anyone else is.”

HC: How did you become involved in the political side of the industry?

Wolfe: In the 1980s, when reimbursement cuts were occurring, we realized as a company that we needed to work as an industry to communicate better with the government to discuss issues and clarify some areas that we weren't sure they understood about our operations.

There were four or five of us who had some phone conversations in East Tennessee, and these conversations led to the establishment of a DME association called the Tennessee Home Medical Providers Association. [Our attorneys told us] that if we were going to do a lot of lobbying in Congress as an association, the individuals who were going to be doing it frequently should register as lobbyists.