Competitive Bidding:
CHANCE FOR BIDDING DELAY SLIPS THROUGH SUPPLIERS' FINGERS
Published on Tue Jun 03, 2008
Legal challenges also fail to hold off the paradigm-shifting program.
Despite positive indications that Congress would delay the onset of competitive bidding for durable medical equipment, the program took effect as scheduled July 1. But suppliers aren't yet ready to call it quits on ending the program.
"Already the problems are flying and we are only 4 hours into the day," exclaimed Wayne Stanfield with the National Association of Independent Medical Suppliers on July 1.
The bidding program took effect because the Senate failed to vote on pending Medicare legislation. That was despite lots of bipartisan support for both the bidding delay and the physician payment fix that is the focus of the legislation.
Besides letting bidding take effect, the delay may cost suppliers precious momentum in their fight to hold off the program. And it gives nay-sayers a chance to criticize a delay.
For example: Editorials in The New York Times, USA Today and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution all press Congress to let the bidding program go forward as scheduled.
The delay passed by the House is a victory for special interest lobbyists, the Times charges. And the complaints about the program from suppliers "sound like sour grapes from companies whose prices were too high to compete," the Times adds in its June 25 issue.
The House-passed delay is a "great example of how a small group of constituents can potentially beat back a policy that's clearly in the public interest," says Times columnist David Leonhardt. Failing to institute bidding would be "corporate welfare," he adds.
"Companies that provide hospital beds, wheelchairs, walkers and other items to Medicare patients have had a sweet deal," agrees the USA Today editorial. Medicare payment rates "can be astonishingly generous."
The delay should at least be shorter, says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "If reforms are needed, they can surely be implemented in less than 18 months," the newspaper claims.
Suppliers are fighting back against this negative sentiment for a bidding delay. "Congress is trying to fix a broken bidding program that, unless improved, will improperly exclude thousands of qualified home care providers from Medicare--and reduce competition," the American Association for Homecare's Tyler Wilson says in the USA Today. "The proposed improvements would still save billions and preserve quality."
"I am all for competition as a way to assure top quality services and equipment at fair prices," maintains Jean McAdams, owner of Community Home Medical Equipment in Baraboo, WI. But "having the federal government selectively eliminate competitors by a new complicated bureaucratic procedure that inevitably leads to the creation of a near monopoly of giant suppliers willing to supply the cheapest equipment and lowest level of services is not the way we want to serve Medicare seniors," McAdams says in a release from Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI). [...]
