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.
It was quite an eye-opener to see how you get things done in Washington, D.C. It was fun and it was educational, but somewhat sad in some ways, because early on it became evident that if you didn't have a lot of money, if you didn't have a large constituent base that you could speak for, it was very, very difficult to get anything done in Congress.
HC: What motivates you today?
Wolfe: You see people struggling to be independent, to stay at home, to not be a burden to anybody, the families that struggle to find solutions for them — and it's just a continuing need, a problem that cannot be solved in nursing homes and hospitals. It's a home care problem.
We have to find ways to keep people at home and meet the psychological needs of their families. It's a financial burden on them. I don't think Congress really understands just how big [the problem] is and how many of [these patients] there are out there.
DME is 2 percent of the budget, but [DME providers] have a major impact on the well-being of people in their homes. Along with home health care, [what we do is] relatively inexpensive compared to the alternatives for these people. We owe it to them to get that message out better and turn this thing around on their behalf.
HC: What has been your greatest reward?
Wolfe: We have the ability to be involved in the solution for families all over the United States who are trying to stay together, who are trying to stay at home, as they cope with illnesses. It's really great to be in a business that gets to do that.
Chosen from nominations sent in by readers, HomeCare's HomeCaring Awards are presented in recognition of distinguished service to the home medical equipment industry. HomeCare is proud to acknowledge the talent, dedication and generous spirit of those who make the HME community a better place, and who demonstrate the caring that HME is all about.
