Lena Lindahl, llindahl@medpubs.com

"With so many under its care, you might think that Medicare could drive a hard bargain for all kinds of basic supplies. You would be wrong,” said NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw on the June 10 Nightly News.

“Medicare being ‘taken to the cleaners’ for supplies” read a June 12 USA Today headline.

Yes, in case you missed these stories, the national news media are criticizing the HME industry again. What has sparked the latest round of negative stories is a June 12 report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) comparing Medicare spending on HME and supplies to what the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and other payors spend on the same items.

As a business person working in the HME industry, you intuitively know that such a comparison makes little sense. Yes, both Medicare and the VA purchase HME and supplies, but Medicare includes the cost of service in its price whereas the VA handles service separately.

Providing HME is so much more than just dropping a box of supplies on a Medicare beneficiary’s doorstep. To gain the referral for that Medicare patient, you probably offer extra services, such as on-staff respiratory therapists who shield physicians from middle-of-the-night patient calls and emergency departments from unnecessary visits.

But the OIG report did not consider this. Nor did it consider how much it costs you to employ billing staff to handle complicated Medicare reimbursement forms only to wait 3 months or more for payment.

However, to the lay person and many legislators, the OIG report is just the latest evidence of how greedy HME providers are ripping off taxpayers. Because this is a small industry, in terms of both number of companies and dollars spent, it is hard to be noticed by the government and national media. Neither NBC News nor USA Today bothered to include the home care industry’s perspective in their stories.

I find this incredibly frustrating because those who advocate for the home health care industry work harder and are more passionate than any large lobbying organization could ever be. At the American Association for Homecare Legislative Conference, I saw how attendees tirelessly engaged in coalition building with consumer advocacy groups, lobbied their representatives, and engaged pro-competitive bidding CMS and Congressional staffers in discussions.

But despite all of these efforts, in Washington it still comes down to money, power, and number of constituents—and too few of us participate in or contribute toward industry lobbying. Total attendance at the conference was less than 1% of the readership of this magazine. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that on June 19 the House Ways and Means Committee passed a bill that contains both competitive bidding and a co-pay for home health benefits—two of the items AAHomecare had specifically lobbied against. (See “Industry News” on page 12.)

Association membership dues can be steep, but you can help without spending a dime. Contact your local media and alert them about biased national news stories. Invite them out to your location to see first-hand why these stories were wrong. Write your Congressional representatives and explain what competitive bidding would do to your company and your customers. For contact information, simply visit www.aahomecare.org and enter your zip code under Congressional contacts at the bottom of the Web page.

Together we may make enough noise to be heard.