Home Health & Hospice Week

Watchdog agency urges lawmakers to shorten oxygen cap to 13 months. Senators recently got an earful about excessive payments in the home medical equipment industry, and that's not helping suppliers' efforts to win legislative help with competitive bidding and the oxygen cap. In the Senate Finance Committee's round-table discussion on health care finance reform April 21, the HHS Office of Inspector General highlighted recent findings alleging that Medicare overpays suppliers. "Health care programs should have mechanisms to ensure that payments remain reasonable and reflect market conditions," OIG General Chief Counsel Lewis Morris told the committee in prepared testimony. Problem #1: Medicare pays suppliers more than $17,000 for negative pressure wound therapy pumps, but suppliers themselves pay only an average of $3,600 for the items, the OIG maintains (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XVIII, No. 12, p. 95). Market forces have driven the prices down since Medicare set the payment rate for [...]