THANKS TO THE RECENTLY formed Coalition for Access to Medical Services, Equipment and Technology and its report refuting the Congressional Budget Office's data demonstrating competitive bidding's supposed cost-effectiveness, I believe the home care industry now has a better chance to beat back the provision and its proponents.

Congressional members like to make their decisions based on hard numbers and data. And, until recently, the only competitive-bidding data legislators have been privy to has come from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office — all of which are federal government agencies and all have “data” proving competitive bidding will work on a national level and is a good system for controlling Medicare DME expenditures.

A few months ago, flanked by durable medical equipment providers and end-users, I sat in Sen. Bob Graham's office in Washington, watching his aide react indifferently to an explanation of the detrimental effects of a nationwide Medicare DME competitive bidding program were explained.

Indifference was a common reaction among most of congressmen I visited that day, and I was struggling trying to understand, how? How could someone listen these testimonials and still believe competitive bidding is a good idea?

Then, I was enlightened by something Graham's aide said — and something that some of the other congressional aides and congressmen in favor of competitive bidding said in some form or fashion during my visits: “According to the data we've been given …,” and on went the light bulb in my head.

It's no wonder certain key legislators believe competitive bidding is the cure-all for controlling Medicare DME expenditures. If you were a congressman and all you were getting was positive testimony and data about a new system that apparently can save Medicare more than $7 billion over 10 years, what would your opinion be? Particularly if the only information from the opposition was testimony — and no hard data — from representatives of an industry that, from what you've heard, is rife with individuals and companies defrauding Medicare.

At least now there is independent data showing the true costs — and not all just monetary either — of implementing competitive bidding nationally. Thanks to CAMSET, Congressional members are now armed with hard numbers to compare to CBO's data, which all of us in the industry will welcome, since the CBO data conveniently omitted administrative costs to implementing the measure nation wide.

However, simply because I believe Congress prefers to make informed decisions backed by data, it's not to say it's the only way they come to a decision on issues. Constituent opinions carry a lot of weight to an elected official, so by no means am I suggesting that lobbying and contacting your congressmen is useless. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's going to take both statistical data to refute proponents' data and a full-court press by DME providers on their congressmen, and only through doing both can our industry succeed.

For more on CAMSET and its report, please see Pg. 12.