60 Minutes on Medicare Fraud and Who's to Blame

60 Minutes, the CBS newsmagazine, recently ran a sensational piece highlighting Medicare fraud in Southern FL.
YOU CAN ACCESS THE ARCHIVED VIDEO AND ARTICLE BY CLICKING HERE
Inside Cape Medical Supply, and hundreds of other reputable home medical equipment companies across the country, this piece raised eyebrows, and concerns. We work extraordinarily hard to comply with a litany of federal regulations and mandates, and spend an inordinate amount of time effort and energy to remain in compliance and monitor, the numerous new regulations and policies being issued by Medicare. Yet here we see common street criminals so easily skirting the laws and compromising the integrity of the program, which causes our own reimbursement to decline and leaves federal legislators citing fraud in our sub-sector as the reality du jour.
Inevitably the backlash against these criminals produces more regulations, more burdensome compliance issues and more heavy handed legislative tactics…which quite obviously to an outside observer, simply further compromises the legitimate providers ability to provide services to Medicare beneficiaries. These regulations are driving thousands of small providers across the country to give-up servicing Medicare patients and causing serious concerns about access to services in many areas of the country.
The 60 Minutes piece finally did something that so many previous articles and spotlights have failed to do – it laid the blame at the doorstep of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the criminals who have consistently defrauded the agency, rather than reflexively blaming an entire industry of honest, hard working people who save this country untold billions of dollars by working so hard to keep patients in their homes.
Watch the piece and then feel free to stop by any one of our convenient locations; you’ll be greeted by a full inventory, a smiling face, and a knowledgeable local company who was honored as one of the best home medical equipment companies in the country by an independent industry panel. We are more shocked and outraged than anyone by what we saw in that piece, and remain determined to help Medicare fight fraud, rather than figuring out ways to perpetrate it.
Industry leaders hold the answers on how we can work with the government to help combat fraud and we await their honest solicitation for engagement on how we can partner to solve these problems. They must strike a more conciliatory tone with the industry and admit their mistakes, rather than consistently trying to label all companies as criminals. If and when CMS engages us in the solutions process, they will gain an ally not an adversary and we can all work together to reduce overall spending, increase the quality of care, and get back about the business of collaborating to reduce healthcare costs and increase quality by keeping our patients where they want to be…at home.