WHY WE CAN NO LONGER BILL MEDICARE

For the last several years, Medicare has been implementing changes, one of which is to require that Durable Medical Equipment (DME) dealers who are Medicare providers be “Accredited” (by one of several agencies approved to handle the process) to prove that the DME company is honest, competent, courteous, helpful and doing its best for its customers. We certainly don’t object to those ideas. We have tried to provide that kind of service in the more than 40 years we have been in business.

At first, the new requirements only affected those companies that sold the “big 10" products in Medicare claims - oxygen, diabetes supplies, wheel chairs, home hospital beds, etc. However, by the end of Sept., 2009, all companies who were DME Medicare providers had to be “Accredited” or they were dropped as Medicare providers. The problem for us was that the minimum cost for Accreditation would have been thousands of dollars in fees and expenses and the process would have taken a great deal of time and paperwork. The only way for us to comply would have been to hire an additional person and to raise prices considerably. We did not feel this would be fair to all our non-Medicare customers or to our institutional customers and their patients. Therefore, with much regret for the serious inconvenience to our Medicare customers, we chose NOT to become accredited and we are no longer a Medicare provider. Some other companies in this small, specialized market have withdrawn from Medicare as well and at least two have gone out of business, so those who need to have claims filed with Medicare, unfortunately now have several fewer supplier options.

Since we are not a Medicare provider, we can no longer send claims to Medicare for anyone.  And any product purchased directly from us will not be covered by Medicare. However, Medicare will cover many of the products we manufacture or import if they are purchased from companies that are Medicare providers.

Click Here to see our recomendations for finding a Medicare accredited supplier in your area that will be able to purchase the products from us and bill them to Medicare for you.

Sincerely,

Tom and Dorothy Lennox
and Staff at Luminaud