OWNERS SAY NEW MEDICARE BIDDING PROCESS "UNSUSTAINABLE"
A new bidding program may be saving Medicare hundreds of millions of dollars but is squeezing small companies with unreasonably low rates, according to business owners who testified last week before a Congressional committee.
Medicare is preparing to expand a new competitive bidding program for medical products and equipment such as oxygen therapy devices, wheelchairs and walkers. Medicare will take bids from companies who want to sell their medical equipment and use those prices to calculate what it is willing to pay. Medicare will then offer contracts to companies that make the lowest realistic bids.
The program was tested in nine regions in 2011, and Medicare says it saved more than $200 million that year while handing out many contracts to small businesses. Medicare said 51 percent of the winning bidders in that pilot program were companies with less than $3.5 million in annual revenue.
Medicare describes the program as an "auction." But critics note that in a traditional auction process, low bidders wouldn't be allowed to pull their bids. In the current Medicare process companies can submit very low bids and then withdraw them — but Medicare will still factor those "low-ball" bids into its calculations to determine how much it will offer to pay. That hurts small medical equipment businesses which could generate a large chunk of their revenue from Medicare but which can't afford to sell their products at a loss.
Tammy Zelenko, who runs a Pittsburgh-area company called Advacare Home Services that sells products such as home oxygen devices and hospital beds, told the House Subcommittee on Healthcare and Technology last week that Medicare sometimes offers contracts at rates lower than the prices that companies have actually bid. But companies feel pressure to accept those contracts because Medicare provides so much of their revenue.
Zelenko said that hurts small businesses and favors bigger firms who can make up their losses on other products.
"CMS has designed a program that does not hold bidders accountable, does not ensure that bidders are qualified or capable to provide the products in the bid markets, and, due to the arbitrary nature of the capacity analysis, has produced bid rates that are financially unsustainable," she testified.
Small bidders also complain that the regions that many Medicare contracts cover are too large for them to service, and ultimately favor larger suppliers.
University of Maryland Economics Professor Peter Cramton agrees the process is deeply flawed and disputes Medicare's reported savings. Cramton is an expert on auction theory who has helped several countries design energy and greenhouse gas auctions. He testified before the subcommittee that the process encourages unreasonably low bids and lacks transparency. Cramton said a true auction process — in which all bids would be binding — would save much more money.
"The (Medicare) design is not an auction at all but an arbitrary pricing process," Cramton said, quoting from a letter that a group of auction experts wrote to the White House in 2011. "The current program is the antithesis of science and contradicts all that is known about proper market design."
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FREE BUSINESS ANALYSIS TOOL
The Small Business Administration has a new tool available to help business owners and startups find customers, target their advertising and measure their performance against their peers.
The free tool, called SizeUp, uses data from hundreds of private and public sources.
SizeUp can help analyze a business in comparison to other similar companies in the same field. It has a mapping feature to show where customers and suppliers are located. It also provides suggested areas for advertising based on regions with the highest revenue for an industry and the most underserved markets.
The tool can be found at www.sba.gov/sizeup .
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BUSINESS PLAN COMPETITION
Rice University is sponsoring a business plan competition for graduate students around the world. The 2013 competition is open to students who are in a degree program, and entrants must be part of a team of between two and five students. It is aimed at graduate students, but teams are allowed to have some undergraduates. All graduate students are eligible to take part, including those in business, law, medicine and other fields.
Teams must submit applications, summaries and video pitches by Feb. 18. On March 11, the judges will announce the 42 teams that will move on to the final competition. They must submit written business plan outlines by March 18 and travel to Rice, which is located in Houston, for the competition on April 11-13.
Prizes are expected to total more than $1 million.
You can find more information at www.rbpc.rice.edu/rbpc.aspx .
