Home Health & Hospice Week
DMERCs Could Hold The Reins On Bidding
Proposed bidding timeline revealed at first advisory committee meeting. The long-awaited Program Advisory and Oversight Committee meeting held some eye-openers for durable medical equipment suppliers in areas that took members by surprise.
CMS will take public comments on the meet-ing until Oct. 20 at paoc@cms.hhs.gov, it notes on its bidding Web site. The next PAOC meeting will take place in Baltimore on Dec. 6 and 7.
One of the less welcome suggestions from competitive bidding contractor Research Triangle Institute was that the DME regional carriers could serve as bidding contractors. PAOC member Dave Kazynski, president of VGM's HOMELINK division, was surprised that the Centers for Medicare & Med-icaid Services is considering using the four DMERCs to implement DME competitive bidding, VGM says on its Web site.
PAOC members including Apria Healthcare Group Inc. CEO Larry Higby protested the DMERCs running bidding at the Oct. 6 meeting in Baltimore, according to press reports. DMERCs are already too overloaded to take on another huge burden, PAOC members said.
RTI did propose other methods of administration, including CMS running bidding in-house or a single outside contractor running the program, Invacare Corp. notes on its Web site. Invacare's Cara Bachen-heimer sits on the PAOC.
The impact of CMS choosing DMERCs or some other contractor isn't yet clear, says Erik Sokol of the Power Mobility Coalition. "It's the devil you know versus the devil you don't know," Sokol quips.
Another surprise was CMS' statement that it would pick "10 of the largest metropolitan statistical areas" for bidding implementation in 2007. Suppliers had thought that the top 10 largest MSAs would see bidding, but factors other than size now appear to be included in the consideration process.
Other issues discussed at the meeting included:
RTI also floated the idea of grandfathering in suppliers who are already accredited through "deemed status." When such suppliers' accreditation would lapse, they would be required to obtain accreditation through the new CMS-approved accrediting body.
But suppliers weren't satisfied those numbers showed the whole picture, with the true cost of the demos being glossed over. "There needs to be a review by the [HHS Office of Inspector General] to determine the true scoring of any savings under competitive bidding," says VGM's Kazynski says. The calculations "would factor in cost-shifting and implementation of [Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan] cuts this January. Right now we just don't have that data."
The CMS reports seemed to be a "rubber stamp" on the projects' success, despite serious industry misgivings, Sokol says. "There has been no look at bidding in the long term," he protests. Bidder behavior is apt to change drastically when bidding is no longer a geographically isolated project, and when it continues for years.
Editor's Note: The meeting agenda and slide presentations are at www.cms.hhs.gov/suppliers/dmepos/compbid/paoc.asp#meeting.
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