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You care. I care. But does CMS care? That is the question.

You care. I care. But does CMS care? That is the question.

Over the past week or so while performing my work here at HME News, I ran across the idea of “caring” several times. It made me realize that most of us take caring for granted. I know I do. It's just what we do. We care about out jobs. We care about our families. We care about our friends. We care about our homes.  We pretty much care about all the stuff that makes up our lives.

In reading over the November issue of HME News, which we ship to the printers Monday, two quotes about caring struck me. Both came from people we interviewed and who will be speaking at Medtrade next month.

Erick Allen

HME News: Where do HME providers excel?

Allen: They care. You cannot find a more caring and compassionate group of people—they really want to do well. It is one of the most amazing groups of entrepreneurs you'll ever see.

Jonathan Gordon

HME News: What do HME providers do well in the retail space?

Gordon: Really caring about the patient and really having the patient's best interest in mind. That's something they can leverage, because they already have that mindset. It gets them a lot of the way down the road toward what they need to do for customer service and marketing to build a retail operation.

I wanted to pass those quotes a long because people do notice the good work that HME providers do.

Now for another quote. This one is from Esta Willman, a California provider who is also a member of the Program Advisory and Oversight Committee (PAOC) on competitive bidding. As most of us know by now, competitive bidding is a lousy program full of flaws that will lead to disaster. The industry has said this for a long time, but recently 167 independent economists said the same thing in a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee.

Here's what Willman told me a week or so ago, again it's about caring

“I would hope there would be a delay long enough to have a look at what these economists are talking about and then from there making an informed decision. I hate to say that this thing ought to go through a rebid one more time, but at the risk of decimating an industry and curtailing patient access to things that they need and increasing Part A costs, that would be prudent. There should be no pride in this kind of a program. There should be no personal agenda. Not when you are talking about a national program that involves the health of people.”

The question now is: Do CMS bureaucrats care what these 167 economists have to day?

I hope so.

Mike Moran

 

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