Boston CBS affiliate WBZ ran an investigative news segment last week on the post-implementation fallout from CMS’s competitive bidding on local patients and HME businesses.
To watch the video, click the image below or click here.
WBZ reporter Karen Anderson focused much of the report on an oxygen patient, Marilyn Thierren, who can no longer get enough oxygen tanks to maintain activities outside of her home. Instead her provider gave her a home-filling system, ostensibly as a cost-saving measure, but the report said Thierren is unable to use it due to arthritis.
“I feel right now they are holding me hostage to my own home,” Thierren said in her interview. “They have taken my life away from me.”
The segment also featured Karyn Estrella, executive director of Home Medical Equipment and Services Association of New England, who highlighted the program’s unsustainability due to undermining the businesses it relies on to provide DME to beneficiaries. This results in fewer providers to provide the DME beneficiaries need.
“It’s already started to have an impact on companies going out of business,” she said. “What we are hearing is that the patients are staying at the hospitals for one, two, three days or more because the discharge planner is having a hard time getting the equipment that a patient needs to go home.”
With cuts to reimbursement averaging 46 percent in Round Two, providers such as Alternative Care Providers (Chelmsford, Mass.) are suffering, according to co-owner Michael Schleipfer, who was interviewed for the report. Schleipfer explained that those rates would force Alternative Care Providers to operate unprofitably.
“The only way that you can really compete would really drive down the benefits of our employees and we would have to go to products that are really not that great,” he told WBZ.