Leavitt, Weems Still Stumping for NCB

ATLANTA–Even as HME advocates were celebrating the passage of
H.R. 6331, the Medicare bill that includes a delay of national
competitive bidding, HHS and CMS officials were taking their
arguments for the bidding program to the public.

In a scathing op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal
July 9–the same day the Senate voted on the bill–Michael O.
Leavitt, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services,
painted a grim picture of the HME industry.

“Right now, the government is paying insane rental prices
for medical equipment–prices far higher than it would cost to
purchase the equipment outright,” Leavitt wrote in his
article, titled “Will Congress Continue a Medicare
Scam?” He noted that current Medicare fee schedules were not
established based on competitively determined market prices.

“It is a price-fixing program, and the equipment suppliers
like it because they get overpaid and don’t have to
compete,” he alleged. He added that through Medicare, the
government now pays 10 times “the free-market price of
purchasing a concentrator outright … Even allowing for the costs
of setting up equipment, training and fitting the beneficiary, and
other things, the rental fee is way out of line.”

Leavitt also took a swipe at Congress.

“Make no mistake, ‘delay’ means kill,”
he wrote. “Killing this competitive bidding program would
cost taxpayers about $1 billion annually, while unjustly
overcharging senior citizens.

“If Congress fails to uphold even this modest effort at
entitlement reform, there is little reason to believe its members
will muster the political courage for the unspeakably harder
choices that await them.”

Waterloo, Iowa-based buying group VGM blasted Leavitt’s
piece, saying it was an attack that “could not be farther
from the truth” and was an attempt to “muddy the waters
just prior to a major vote.”

“Here is a case where the secretary of the HHS is
intentionally misstating the facts and lying to both Congress and
to the American public at large,” VGM officials said.
“It should be beneath the dignity of a U.S. Cabinet member to
resort to lies in an effort to salvage a program that is full of
CMS incompetence from top to bottom.”

VGM called on providers to respond to the article and continue
to connect with their legislators to tell the truth about the
industry and its services.

Meanwhile, CMS Acting Administrator Kerry Weems was in
Riverside, Calif., one of the 10 round one competitive bidding
areas, to answer questions about the project, according to the
The Press-Enterprise. Weems met with Medicare and Medicaid
beneficiaries as well as medical suppliers on Thursday, the paper
said.

The newspaper reported that, even though competitive bidding
might be “short-lived,” Weems said CMS is still
committed to the program. “Nothing has changed, and we go
about doing our job,” he told the newspaper.

Weems added that if the Medicare package is enacted, providers
who won bids and have made significant investments in inventory and
staffing could face big problems.