Michigan medical equipment suppliers unhappy about Medicare competitive bidding

Crain's Detroit Business: A regulatory change by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "could put a crimp on hospital-based medical home product subsidiaries and hundreds of other Michigan-based vendors," an industry that has been growing. "The regulation — which establishes a competitive bidding process for companies that provide medical home equipment to Medicare patients and also limits the number of companies under contract — could drive out of business up to 90 percent of the roughly 500 Michigan home health supply vendors, several company executives tell Crain's."

"Medicare's competitive bidding program, which was mandated by Congress in 2003 and later modified in 2008, is intended to save Medicare more than $1 billion annually" (Greene, 4/18).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.