WASHINGTON—While President Obama is still plugging the virtually comatose health care reform bill, he told those attending a Democratic National Committee fundraiser on Thursday that it could actually die in Congress.

"If Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not. That’s the way democracy works," the president said.

The embattled reform effort has been in a precarious position since Massachusetts voters elected Republican Scott Brown to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy. Brown’s win snuffed out the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and raised serious questions about their ability to get the bill passed.

That was good news for HME stakeholders, whose own health was at stake due to a number of provisions in the Senate health reform bill that included expansion of competitive bidding, elimination of the first-month purchase option for power wheelchairs, a manufacturer excise tax and a productivity adjustment.

"It really gives us an opportunity to get back in and kill off the Senate provisions that were very harmful to the industry. Before, we were toast," said John Gallagher, vice president of government relations for Waterloo, Iowa-based VGM Group. "We’ve got to regroup and reshape the message and get it right back out there. This is no time to take a breath."

Seth Johnson, vice president of government affairs for Exeter, Pa.-based Pride Mobility Products, agreed, adding that the industry must remain vigilant.

While the Senate provisions might not be enacted in a future comprehensive health reform bill, they could surface elsewhere, he warned. For example, Congress must act before March 1 or physicians in the Medicare program will take a 21 percent reimbursement cut—something the powerful American Medical Association and others have roundly denounced.

"That is something that Congress absolutely will act on sometime within this month," Johnson said. Both the House and the Senate have voted to exempt the "doc fix" bill from pay-go rules and it does not appear that legislators will look to HME as a pay-for, "but there is no guarantee they will not try to do that," Johnson said.

Legislators would prefer the physicians—who pour money into legislators’ coffers—not take any cuts, but that’s not such a popular idea with the public, Gallagher said.

"The doc fix is a hard sell right now with people unemployed," he said, adding that he anticipates legislators will try to sneak the doc fix into a jobs bill in order to avoid debate.

The creation of jobs has surfaced as the more urgent national issue above health care, and Obama said at Thursday’s fundraiser that a jobs package would be moving through the legislation process over the next several weeks.

That very topic could be a plus for HME, the lobbyists said. Even as the industry works to get rid of the Senate bill’s damaging provisions, advocates also now have a window of time (Gallagher expects the health reform debate to resume in late March or early April and a bill to be up for a vote in June) to fight the biggest threat of all: DMEPOS competitive bidding.