ARLINGTON, Va.—As of last week, the American Association
for Homecare’s Rehab and Assistive Technology Council, or
RATC, has officially changed its name. The new moniker is the
Complex Rehab and Mobility Council, according to Chairman Tim
Pederson.
The reason?
“Any time your acronym has the word ‘RAT’ in its
name, an organization is already at a disadvantage,”
according to Pederson, CEO of WestMed Rehab in Rapid City,
S.D.
That’s no joke, Pederson said. “For too long, people in
the industry have referred to it as the ‘RAT-C.’ I
think it taints our arguments on Capitol Hill just because the word
‘rat’ has such a negative connotation.”
In addition, Pederson said, “We wanted to embrace current
industry terminology. ‘Rehab and assistive technology’
as a phrase is a little bit outmoded. ‘Complex
rehab’ is the current industry phrase for what we
do.
“Then again, ‘complex rehab’ doesn’t
have a broad meaning outside of the industry, so we added the word
‘mobility’ to give the name some relevance to the
people we talk to in Washington,” he said.
“‘CRMC’ flows off the tongue much better than
‘RATC.’ It is important that our terms are easy to
remember for the industry and the wider marketplace.”
The name change isn’t the only thing the CRMC is
pursuing.
“We are going to be expanding our efforts [on a separate
complex rehab benefit]. We’re working on a complex rehab task
force to try to bring all of the voices in the industry together on
that project,” Pederson said, noting the Council is working
with NCART, NRRTS and RESNA on the initiative. (For more from
Pederson on a separate rehab benefit, see HomeCare, June 2009.)
Restoration of the 9.5 percent cut also “is still a big issue
for us,” Pederson said, although “it’s going to
be tough.
“We’ve always thought it would be a heavy lift to do
that, and I haven’t seen anything to change my mind,”
he said. “I think anytime you are trying to restore funding
to a program when Congress is in a budget-cutting mode, the odds
are stacked against you. But they’re not stacked any worse
than they have been.
“We have our ears to the ground now, and of course
we’re looking for friendly legislators who might want to
sponsor something like that, but it needs the right vehicle and the
right time.”
As for Congress’ health reform measures, Pederson said
he’s hoping rumors are true that the Senate bill won’t
include elimination of the first-month purchase option for power
wheelchairs. While the House bill strikes the option for Groups 1
and 2 PWCs, it keeps the purchase option for Groups 3 and
higher.
However, said Pederson, only a partial pullback of the option
elimination is “really not that helpful.
“When you have that part of the mobility benefit essentially
gone, it eliminates that whole line of business for complex rehab
providers,” he said, noting that to be effective, complex
rehab providers must supply the whole spectrum of mobility.
“In many cases, the less complex services we provide
subsidize what we can do on the more complex side, so the loss of
that support revenue really diminishes the amount of choice in what
people can get from mobility,” he continued.
“I guess we won’t know whether the rumors are true
until we actually see the bill,” Pederson said, “but
I’m hopeful.”
