ARLINGTON, VA – The American Association for Homecare says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ bidding program will put durable medical equipment providers out of business and disrupt services to 3 million seniors and disabled people in 10 regions.
“The Secretary of Health and Human Services has called home-based healthcare ‘radically’ more efficient than institutional care, yet the federal government is determined to aggressively dismantle the nation’s homecare infrastructure at a time when our healthcare system needs it most,” said Tyler J. Wilson, president of AAH.
The areas identified by the AAH are Charlotte, N.C., Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas-Fort Worth, Kansas City, Miami, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Riverside, Calif. and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
On March 28, durable medical equipment (DME) providers in those regions received letters from CMS explaining whether they had been offered a contract, disqualified from bidding or bid outside the range for a product.
The DME providers who did not receive contracts from CMS have been shut out of the Medicare program for three years. AAH officials said they have received word from hundreds of DME providers who say they have been improperly disqualified and removed from the process.
The AAH, in a recent letter, requested that CMS extend the contract evaluation window and that the first round of implementation be postponed.
“The contract evaluation window needs to be extended because suppliers who have been offered contracts are faced with inadequate time in which to determine whether to accept the CMS offer,” Wilson wrote in the letter to Kerry Weems, acting administrator for CMS.
AAH “has been contacted by numerous DME suppliers in round one who have outlined serious irregularities or mistakes by the Competitive Bidding Implementation Contractor.” Wilson said. “These actions … have triggered improper disqualifications of round one bids submitted by durable medical equipment companies in nearly all of the first 10 bidding areas. These suppliers have documentation supporting the fact that they submitted complete applications but were disqualified regardless.”
Many of the disqualifications were related to documentation, accreditation or single-bid requirements.
Wilson asked that suppliers who were improperly disqualified be reinserted in the supplier selection and contracting process. Postponing round one, he said, would allow safeguards to be properly applied and allow CMS to ensure that “all disqualification decisions were valid.”
The competitive bidding program was designed to reduce the number of DME providers and reimbursement rates for oxygen therapy, hospital beds, wheelchairs and other types of home-based equipment and care in Medicare. Reimbursement rates were already set by CMS and rates for oxygen have already been cut by nearly 50 percent over the past 10 years, according to the AAH.
“We’re alarmed about the volume of the mistakes made by Medicare’s contractor tasked with evaluating bids and implementing the bidding program,” said Heather Allan, executive director of the Florida Association of Medical Equipment Services. “A process this obviously flawed needs to be stopped, analyzed and corrected if it can’t be done away with altogether. If it’s not, the ramifications for Medicare beneficiaries and small businesses alike will be much worse than we anticipated.”