Editor's Note

And That’s the Way it Wasn’t

Will the mainstream news media ever cover the homecare industry fairly?

• By David Kopf
• Feb 01, 2010

Sometimes I really question my choice of career. No, not homecare; I’m talking about journalism. I say this because I’m increasingly getting tired of having to share that professional designation with the same people who engage in the defamation of the HME industry.

After a full year of mainstream media slams against HME culminating in October’s Fox News vilifying of the industry, it appears that we can expect much of the same during 2010. We’re off to a roaring start with the Jan. 19 installment of Dan Rather Reports, “Paging Doctor Fraud,” in which Rather interviews Lew Morris, general counsel for the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. This is the same Morris who refuses to acknowledge that the cost to provide service to patients is not limited to the cost of equipment.

In the report, Morris is given free reign to reiterate the HHS OIG’s “study” of wheelchair costs that ignored substantial costs associated with providing power wheelchairs. Morris then makes similar arguments about oxygen services, and misleads Rather’s audience by comparing the purchase price of a concentrator against the total cost of service.

Then, the report gets, well, nauseating. Rather implies that the industry’s and patients’ effort to protect the oxygen benefit was the work of “lobbyists,” and Morris follows by practically sneering at the desperate effort on the part of the providers and patients to protect the benefit.

I want to run his full quote for posterity: “The home-health agencies and those who supply these concentrators organized, even brought senior citizens dragging oxygen tanks behind them to go up on the Hill and beg their representatives not to cut their oxygen supply, not to let them die, not to let the price of this critically valued piece of equipment be reduced. And Congress heard. So, the Medicare program was stopped from reducing those prices.”

Medicare was stopped from cutting oxygen? Which Medicare are we talking about? The one that has implemented the 36-month rental cap? The one that enforced the 9.5 percent cut to oxygen per MIPPA? The one that is re-bidding round one of its competitive bidding program? (To learn how oxygen providers are contending with these cuts, read “Changing the Game.”)

Morris is engaging in a complete falsehood by refusing to acknowledge that the oxygen benefit has already been cut to the bone. The man that advises CMS and lawmakers on how they should make policy is making up his own set of facts.

But even more stomach churning is Rather’s contribution to the piece. I can’t tell if he is a rube of a journalist or propagandist. AAHomecare’s vice president of communications and policy, Michael Reinemer, learned about the report and made a solid effort to alert the Dan Rather Reports team to its various factual errors. Neither HDNet, the Dallasbased television channel that runs Dan Rather Reports, nor the Dan Rather Reports team cared.

Why is that? Why would a show that says it reports the news the networks “can’t, or won’t,” practically act as a shill for the HHS OIG, which has made a concerted effort for nearly a year to get news outlets to parrot its set of facts? In a word: ratings. Reporting that an industry is ripping off taxpayers is far more sensational and easy to understand than reporting that CMS and congress are trying to gut an easy target because they don’t have the courage to stand up to the parties that are really overburdening the Medicare budget. Besides, some of those parties might be advertisers.

But as sensational and misleading as the story was, it gives me hope in a strange way. The more Morris and the HHS OIG try to spoon feed their story to the consumer news, the more I am convinced that the industry’s efforts are paying off. Read Mark Smith’s column on engaging patients in advocacy work on page 34 and follow his advice. They say no news is good news, but Morris’s desperate negativity feels pretty good. Keep fighting.

This article originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of HME Business.