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.