The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing a new Medicare rule could have devastating consequences for millions of seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities. And here’s the kicker – it’s a policy that President Trump rejected, that Dr. Mehmet Oz would never support, and that cuts directly against the very conservative principles many in Congress claim to defend.
Here’s what’s happening: CMS has proposed expanding its Competitive Bidding Program (CBP) to include urological, ostomy, and tracheostomy supplies. On paper, that might seem like a cost-saving measure. In reality, it’s a bureaucratic decision that would strip patients of their ability to choose the medical products they depend on to manage serious, often lifelong conditions.
Let’s be clear, these aren’t optional items. Catheters, ostomy bags, and trach tubes help people safely go to the bathroom, breathe, and live with independence and dignity.
These highly individualized products must be fitted carefully to each person’s body and are not easily interchangeable. They certainly shouldn’t be selected by whichever company submits the lowest bid to the federal government.
So why is CMS moving forward anyway?
The agency claims that expanding the program to include these supplies will help reduce fraud, which is particularly salient given a recent federal investigation that involved catheters.
But that logic doesn’t hold up here.
While fraud prevention is a worthy goal, catheters, ostomy, and tracheostomy supplies are already tightly regulated and physician-prescribed, with clinical oversight and documentation requirements. Applying a blunt pricing mechanism to these complex, patient-specific products under the guise of fraud control penalizes legitimate suppliers and jeopardizes patient health.
Additionally, for these types of supplies, CBP’s “lowest bidder wins” approach creates a race to the bottom – where patients are forced to use cheap, generic products that don’t fit, don’t work, and too often lead to infections, ER visits, and hospital stays.
That’s where this proposal completely flies in the face of common-sense health policy.
President Trump has spent years fighting this kind of bureaucratic overreach. His America First Healthcare Plan promised to empower put patients first, cut red tape, and give people more choice, something his CMS Administrator from his first administration, Seema Verma, executed faithfully.
Before he was CMS Administrator, Dr. Mehmet Oz made his name by educating the public about personalized care, innovation, and patient empowerment. On his TV show and on the campaign trail, Dr. Oz railed against “one-size-fits-all” medicine. He called for more control in the hands of patients and providers, not D.C. bureaucrats. There’s no way he’d support a rule that lets a spreadsheet decide which catheter a disabled veteran gets.
Let’s also talk about economics. This rule is a death sentence for small, community-based medical suppliers, many of whom have served their regions for decades. They simply can’t survive a federal program that rewards only the largest national chains who can supposedly offer the lowest prices. This isn’t conservative reform, it’s corporate consolidation. It punishes entrepreneurship and small businesses. It kills local jobs.
Critically, it removes the kind of high-touch service that vulnerable patients rely on every day.
In short, this rule is wrong on policy, wrong on economics, and wrong on principle. It cuts against everything President Trump and Dr. Oz have stood for: respect for patient choice, deregulation, market-based solutions, and protecting seniors from harm.
Perhaps the most galling point of all, the proposed rule reverses a clear bipartisan decision made in 2003, when Congress passed the Medicare Modernization Act and explicitly excluded these types of supplies from competitive bidding. No device implanted in the human body has ever been subjected to competitive bidding. With this, CMS is proposing to upend more than 20 years of policy with one rule.
If this rule goes through, patients will suffer – like the grandmother who can’t get the ostomy supplies that fit her, or the disabled veteran who ends up in the ER because of an infection from a poorly made catheter. Imagine what will happen to the small-town supplier, who has to close up shop because they lost a bid they never had a fair shot at.
We don’t need to guess what Trump or Dr. Oz would do here – they’ve shown us through their words and actions. They should stop this rule in its tracks.
