Pending House legislation is poised to include provisions that would permanently exclude manual complex rehab technology (CRT) wheelchairs from the competitive bidding program and would delay Medicare from applying competitive bidding-derived reimbursement rates to accessories for manual CRT wheelchair for 18 months.
The legislative language comes from H.R. 2293, the Protecting Access to Complex Rehab Manual Wheelchairs Act, and its Senate companion, S. 1223.
Those provisions would be included in a new healthcare bill, HEARTS and Rural Relief Act, which the House Ways and Means Committee intends to review and approve in a markup session tomorrow. The main thrust of the bill concerns healthcare for returning military veterans.
“The inclusion of our CRT language in a larger bill is excellent news, and the fact the bill is going through the Committee ‘markup’ process places the bill in a much stronger position for a full House vote,” said Don Clayback, executive director of the National Coalition for Assistive and Rehab Technology (NCART), in a public statement. “Our immediate objective is to get the new bill approved by the Committee at tomorrow’s markup session.”
To help advance that objective, NCART is asking CRT stakeholders to review the list of Ways and Means Committee Members and, if their Representative is on the Committee, to contact that lawmaker’s office (phone numbers can be found via the House of Representative Directory) to ask that he or she approve the HEARTS and Rural Relief Act during the markup session.