CMS released the new single payment amounts and began sending contract offers to winning bidders earlier this week for the latest re-compete of Round Two of its competitive bidding program.
Current The Round Two and national mail-order program contracts expire on June 30. Contracts for the re-compete of Round Two and the national mail order contracts for diabetic testing supplies become effective on July 1 and run through Dec. 31, 2018. CMS reports it plans to announce the contract suppliers this spring.
Contract offer summaries segmented by competitive bid area; Round Two re-compete SPAs broken down by region and product category; and SPAs for the national diabetic testing supply mail-order re-compete can be found at http://bit.ly/HMEB-round2recompete.
CMS offered more than 12,000 contracts to 637 Round Two re-compete bidders. The American Association for Homecare reports that bidders who currently furnish items in an awarded bid area, or within the product category received 93 percent of the new offers in the Round Two re-compete. Nine companies will receive offers under the national mail order re-compete for diabetic testing supplies, the association notes.
The association reports it is analyzing what the latest round of prices and contract offers means for the industry, but the initial reaction is not positive.
“While we feel fortunate to be included in the bid offering process, I am shocked at the apparent extent of the price cuts,” said Steve Ackerman, CEO of Spectrum Medical and vice chairman of AAHomecare’s board of directors. “It appears there are reductions to certain items that take them far below previous low bid prices. We need some explanation and transparency from CMS on how these prices were derived.”
Providers have limited time to respond to CMS’s contract offers and receive correspondence via CMS’s Connexion portal, which apparently went down after CMS sent out its Round Two re-compete notice. Reports were that the site was denying access and unexpectedly logging people off, but that CMS and CBIC contractor Palmetto were working on a fix.
The limited means and timeframe for responding to contract offers prompted one unnamed provider to share this bit of feedback with AAHomecare: “I’ve got 10 days (and by the way they’ve had over a year) to decide whether I want to jump on a sword or die by a thousand cuts.”