Of the 1,005 providers who filed bid applications for round one of CMS’s national competitive bidding program, 630 – 63 percent of them – were disqualified from the process due to missing information from their applications.

CMS reported this information to congressional staff who attended a Tuesday morning CMS briefing for congressional staff, who then relayed the information to staff at the American Association for Homecare (AAHomecare). Apparently, CMS likened the process to “turning down college applications who forget to include their SAT scores in their applications.”

More than 150 providers have complained to AAHomecare that CBIC, the organization that received, reviewed and processed the bid applications, received everything it should have, yet still refused their bids saying they were incomplete.

“The fact that CMS disqualified 63 percent of the 1,005 bidders in Round One suggests that this whole process got seriously off track somewhere,” said Tyler Wilson, president of AAHomecare. “Blaming the bidders is not going to rectify the problems and restore the integrity of the competitive bidding program. Congress must act to put this whole program on hold and get to the bottom of the problems, which the industry has carefully documented.”