Website to watch: www.nobid.org

With CMS and, go figure, the AARP, telling Medicare beneficiaries that competitive bidding is wonderful, an HME provider in Georgia has taken off the gloves.

Tyler Riddle, vice president of operations at MRS Homecare, has started distributing a “warning flyer” to beneficiaries that tells them how competitive bidding will take away their choice of provider, reduce the services they receive and cost thousands of jobs. It also urges them to visit a website that he created: www.nobid.org.

“Whether you have one location or 1,000 locations, you can put this in the hands of your patients,” he said. “You have to put a delivery ticket out; you have to get a work order signed. Why not hand them a piece of paper and help them protect their health care? What's one more piece of paperwork?”

Riddle wants other providers to join him in educating beneficiaries and enlisting them in the fight against competitive bidding.

Provider Todd Tyson has answered Riddle's call to action. Tyson, president of Hi Tech Homecare in Marietta, Ga., downloaded the warning flyer from nobid.org and distributed 3,800 copies of it to patients this month.

“We sent them out with invoices and put them in new patient packets,” he said. “We set up about 1,000 patients per month and about half of those are Medicare beneficiaries, so we've done quite a few.”

Involving beneficiaries in a fight such as this one can be tricky, but with competitive bidding there's too much at stake not to get them involved, says Michael Hamilton, executive director of the Alabama Durable Medical Equipment Association.

“You don't want to unnecessarily frighten people, but this is pretty clear cut,” he said. “It's not too hard to get this one straight.”

Find out more about www.nobid.org in the HME NewsWire on Monday.

Liz Beaulieu