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Home > Medicare Monitor > Archives > 2008 > June > 12 > Entry
Competitive bid delay bill introduced
Amid growing indications that Congress may block Medicare’s plan to limit medical equipment suppliers to the winners of a controversial competitive bid process, two key lawmakers today introduced a bill to delay the program by 18 months.
Instead of allowing the program to start July 1 in 10 metropolitan areas including South Florida, the bill would cut Medicare payments for the equipment by 9.5 percent nationwide next year. Payments would increase 2 percent in 2014.
The bill was sponsored by Reps. Pete Stark, D-Calif., and Dave Camp, R-Mich., the bipartisan leaders of the House Ways and Means health subcommittee, which oversees Medicare. Among its cosponsors were the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee, the House Commerce Committee and Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.
With that kind of heavyweight support, this bill appears to be on a fast track.
Meanwhile, similar heavy support has been expressed in the Senate. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, inserted an 18-month delay in his Medicare bill addressing physician payments. The committee’s chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., also embraced the delay and promised he would have included the language of the Stark-Camp bill in his version of the Medicare doctor payment bill if it had won today’s cloture vote.
Medicare officials have touted the program — which was mandated in the 2003 Medicare law — as a way of reducing rampant fraud in Medicare bills for medical equipment, and proclaimed that the competitive bids would reduce the average cost for equipment such as oxygen and power wheelchairs by about 26 percent.
Peter Ashkenaz, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said, “Any delay in the implementation of the program will delay the savings that Medicare beneficiaries will see when they buy or rent their medial equipment and supplies from fully accredited suppliers.”
But long-time medical equipment suppliers such as John Mieras, vice president of Advance Medical Support Inc., a Palm Beach Gardens-based national mail-order diabetes supply company, said the bid process was severely flawed.
Mieras said the winning bidders, in many cases, were companies that did not have previous experience selling the equipment they were selected to supply and were not licensed to sell in the geographic areas for which they received winning bids.
Furthermore, Mieras said many of the winning bids were based on companies offering “the least expensive generic products straight from China.” Mieras said companies that submitted bids based on the cost of name-brand products were not selected.
“They are taking away all of the choice, and all of the name brands, and all of the top models from everyone on Medicare, and they’re just not telling anybody that,” Mieras said.
Stark said the bill was introduced because “the Bush administration designed this program with blinders on to the needs of beneficiaries and the small companies that make up most of the DME industry. But, as I told the industry from the start, this is no free lunch. This bill requires the DME industry to finance the cost of delaying the program.”
Camp said the implementation of the bid process “has been flawed and needed to be fixed. This bill provides us with the time to get the program right and ensure we are reducing costs while protecting beneficiaries in the long run. Equally important, this bill requires that we move forward with competitive bidding as a way to reduce costs.”
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