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Lynn Gonzales
Public Relations
The SCOOTER Store
(830)626-4064
Letter to Fox News Correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel Regarding Comments on Scooters and Healthcare Reform
From: Pfister, Michael (Mike)
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 10:39 AM
To: 'marc@doctorsiegel.com'
Cc: Pfister, Michael (Mike)
Subject: Power Mobility Coverage
Dr. Siegel,
My name is Mike Pfister and I am the Executive Vice President of External Affairs for The SCOOTER Store. I wanted to reach out to you and thank you for bringing some balance to the health care debate as it relates to power mobility. More specifically, your accurate responses and characterizations of Senator McCaskill's comments have been right on the mark and have brought light to the type of uninformed political bashing that is filling up the airwaves during such a sensitive and partisan period in our country. More importantly you are highlighting the bad policies that are endangering the quality of health care in America.
The SCOOTER Store is the largest provider of medical mobility devices in the United States. While our company name was established in the early 90's when we started out as a tiny scooter repair company in New Braunfels, Texas, the majority of the prescribed power mobility for our senior citizens has been power wheelchairs. Industry wide, less than 5% of mobility expenditures by Medicare are on scooters. As you know Medicare and other health insurance plans cover durable medical equipment that is used in the home to assist the elderly in conducting the activities of daily living like going to the restroom, moving throughout the home to cook and conduct other activities. For our company, the average age of our customers is over 71 years old and they also average three chronic diseases that will most likely not improve over time. They depend upon the power wheelchairs to provide a level of independence that often times prevents them from having to move to more expensive institutional settings like nursing homes. In fact, an outcome study conducted by a reputable economics group several years ago using Medicare claims data concluded that the Medicare program saves more than $13,000 over a three year period when a beneficiary is provided power mobility when compared to similar beneficiaries with similar diseases who did not have a mobility intervention. I would be happy to send you more details on this study if you are interested. The point I want to reinforce is that our experience is that Medicare is not paying for scooters for lazy people to ride around the mall or grocery store when they should be walking.
There has been much reform in our industry since the "ugly" period in 2002 and 2003 when scooters and power wheelchairs became the target of the Medicare scammers. Utilization for the last four years has been well below CMS estimates. Pricing for power mobility has been lowered almost 40% in real dollars with the national competitive bidding program in progress estimated to lower prices an additional 10-25%. New standards have been introduced for accreditation and bonding and daily operations that continue to whittle down the number of suppliers that compete for physician and patient business. The current healthcare proposal is eliminating the preferred option for most physicians and their patients to have the power wheelchair purchased for the duration of the patient's life. Instead, the benefit is being set up as a rental device which will delay payments over 13 months. For many suppliers, this will be a payment change that creates financing demands that can't be met in today's credit markets, given the pricing pressures and low margins that already exist in the industry. That is the most scary "reform" in the current proposal.
Finally, I want to offer that there is an even more irrational shift poised to clobber our industry related to the documentation demands placed upon physicians to justify power wheelchairs. I would love an opportunity to share this policy that is minimizing the clinical judgment of physicians and allowing CMS to ration healthcare. This might make for an interesting debate on your programs.
I want to thank you again for being an "informed" voice and to offer any assistance that you might need to better understand industry conditions and facts.
Regards,
Mike Pfister
Senior Vice President, External Relations and Government Affairs
The SCOOTER Store
