Washington,
Jun 16, 2002 -
Just as Congress prepares to begin work on all the federal spending bills for the coming fiscal year, word comes that the Medicare program is overpaying billions of dollars for medical supplies.
The Department of Health and Human Service’s Inspector General took a look at what Medicare was paying for these supplies and reported the bad news last week. The I.G.’s audit looked at 16 common medical items-wheelchairs, saline solution and such-and found that the program overpaid almost a billion dollars for those items alone in 2000. Those findings were based on a comparison of what the Veterans Affairs Department spent on the same items during the same period of time.
Here are a few examples. Medicare paid $571 for a wheelchair, while the V.A. paid $128 for the exact same wheelchair. An IV pole cost Medicare $142, but the V.A. bought the same thing for only $50. By the way, the folks at NBC News found one for just $39 at a local drugstore. Medicare paid eight times as much for saline solution as did the Veterans Affairs Department.
Why these huge disparities? The V.A. purchases these items through competitive bidding, as do most state health agencies and private insurers, but Medicare does not. It’s a system that’s been in place for years, and neither Congress nor the bureaucracy has been able to change it.
Says Medicare administrator Tom Scully, “Every time somebody’s tried to do this in any administration, the industries have come in and gone crazy, and they’ve backed off.” At least Scully knows there’s a big problem here: “We are clearly way overpaying for some things and we need to fix it.”
It’s a system that not only hurts taxpayers, but also Medicare recipients, who share 20% of the price.
Scully says new rules will soon go into effect that should reduce costs by 15%. That’s good, but not good enough, particularly if Medicare is paying double, triple, or as much as eight times more than the V.A. for supplies.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas is expected to seek legislation this year that will give Medicare authority to seek competitive bids. Count me as a supporter.
On another front, the Agriculture Department announced last week that it plans to hire at least a thousand temporary workers to help launch some of the new programs included in the massive farm bill that recently became law. You may recall that I voted against this bill because the $83 billion price tag was far too high and not enough aid was targeted toward family farmers.
It appears now that the aid slated for family farms is so difficult to get that, according to The Washington Post, extra workers are needed just to help farmers fill out the forms. Whether it’s buying a wheelchair or getting aid to farmers who need it, we just can’t seem to get the job done easily or efficiently.
