Washington Action Reverberates at Medtrade Spring

Medtrade Spring attendees expecting a somber show and bleak industry forecast instead were re-energized as industry efforts in Washington, D.C., took a turn for the better earlier this month.

Even as the 4,000 participants — 2,600 of them providers, according to show officials — converged on the Long Beach (Calif.) Convention Center May 6, HME representatives were attending a hearing on Capitol Hill centered on competitive bidding. And that hearing, in which House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Pete Stark, D-Calif., said he would try to block the program, led to a follow-up meeting with Stark's staff to discuss alternatives.

“AAHomecare chairman Alan Landauer is leaving here today for a meeting up on the Hill tomorrow … to discuss options for going in a different direction than competitive bidding,” association President Tyler Wilson told his audience during a May 7 update at the spring trade show.

Speaking before a packed room, Wilson offered a brief summary of the Ways and Means hearing, which included testimony from Kerry Weems, acting CMS administrator — who told the committee “there are no problems” with competitive bidding — and provider Tom Ryan, former AAHomecare chairman and CEO of Farmingdale, N.Y.-based Homecare Concepts, who spoke on the association's behalf.

After pointed questioning from committee members, Wilson said, the upshot is that “a whole bunch of important people are going to rethink this … We are building up political headwind.”

But getting rid of competitive bidding will take some doing, Wilson said, and it won't come without a cost.

CMS has already said it expects to save $1 billion annually through the DMEPOS bidding program, so the industry must come up with a way to save that money if the program is eliminated. Based on a Congressional Budget Office estimate of the cost of ending the program, Wilson said that means $6 billion might need to be cut from HME reimbursement over five years unless other alternatives surface.

Wilson quizzed providers on whether they would be willing to take an across-the-board reimbursement cut in return for competitive bidding “going away.”

A five-percent cut got an almost unanimous show of hands. A 10-percent cut drew about an 80 percent showing. At 15 percent, providers started grumbling, but there were still a plentiful number of hands in the air.