Home Health & Hospice Week

Use delay to your advantage, supplier reps say.

If you're a home medical equipment supplier in one of the 10 metropolitan areas affected by round one of Medicare's competitive bidding, your best chance for survival might involve some quick letter writing.

"Providers need to continue to make their members of Congress aware of the effects this proposal will have on home health," coaches Walt Gorski of the American Association for Homecare. "The cost of getting this project wrong is that suppliers will not be able to recover."

Reality: The feds have yet to announce the "winners" in round one of Medicare's competitive bidding program, even though the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has said all along that the winners would be notified in February and announced publicly in March.

Update: CMS is nearing the end of its evaluation process for round one bids, the agency's Joel Kaiser said in the Feb. 20 Open Door Forum for home care providers. CMS will begin offering contracts based on those bids "in the very near future," he promised forum listeners.

Snags in determining the validity of suppliers' bids have plagued CMS (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XVII, No. 2). Such problems haven't been reassuring.

"At a minimum, we need to make sure that every question is answered before proceeding," says Gorski.

In the meantime, CMS is moving fairly quickly toward round two of competitive bidding, a development that concerns stakeholders.

"The expectation was that we would have meaningful feedback from round one before moving ahead to round-two bidding," says Gorski. "Right now, we have no such experience to draw on."

Time bomb: Round two of competitive bidding will affect suppliers in 70 metropolitan areas (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XVII, No. 2).