Thursday, July 18, 2013

Virtual Fly-In: Early Reports Are Exciting!

With a lot on their plates, asking suppliers to take time to call Congress to convince them to stop the DME “competitive” bidding program was a tough request to make. But dealing with a program that’s creating huge access issues and is already putting suppliers out of business is far more difficult. 

The interest in this industry-wide effort was certainly evident in yesterday’s webinar with Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), when attendee traffic overwhelmed the telephone service! For anyone who wasn’t able to get through, you can get a sense of what we talked about by checking out the presentation slides from the webinar.

As of late Thursday afternoon, the homecare community has generated approximately 2,500 new emails to Congress using our Action Center since we updated the message on Tuesday, and we suspect that number will increase significantly through the end of the day on Friday.

While these numbers that we can confirm are encouraging, we would also like to hear feedback from any of your calls to Capitol Hill, or responses to emails that you sent. We would also be interested in hearing about any organized efforts that companies or state associations undertook today.

All feedback—even from those offices that may have told you that CMS has assured them that there are very few complaints about the bidding program—is helpful for our lobbying team here. Please forward any intel to Gordon Barnes at gordonb@aahomecare.org.

Keep the pressure on! Talk to your peers, friends, families, patients, and anyone else affected by the bidding program. Tell them that their help is needed to convince Congress that the bidding program is bad medicine for patients, providers, and our nation's health.

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