Plan Z

The usual feel-good spin has begun.

You Spin Me Right 'Round Baby Right 'Round
I don't mind feeling good; in fact, I'm strongly in favor of it. But what I don't like is when my hopes are raised and then dashed because there's no substance behind the spin that raised them in the first place.

So I'm skeptical, but not unjustly so.

We've all been down the legislative road trying to get competitive bidding repealed. And we've all seen just how successful those efforts were.

I actually get angry when I read articles in the industry press that offer a sunshine-and-kittens take on the latest bill to be introduced in the House of Representatives.

HME News trumpets that it looks like "providers had the luck of the Irish" during AAHomecare's ridiculous legislative conference; the article has Tyler Wilson gushing about how the bill has "infused the conference with excitement" (pardon me while I gag), and one of the bill's authors (Thompson) telling the industry to "put a face" on the issue and "really drive it home."

Hold on a second; I need to gag again.

The latest bill that Tyler Wilson really needs to succeed isn't anything new. Anyone out there who believes that any bill introduced that's meant to repeal competitive bidding and doesn't have some kind of cost to the industry is an idiot. Altmire and Thompson want to use money set aside for other projects that was never spent as a pay-for? I'll believe it when I see it happen, and here's why: There are more pressing things that our government could use that money on. Getting rid of competitive bidding is important, but I can think of several things to spend "spare" money on, and I'm betting that there are others who want to use that money too.

Does our government really have any "spare" money? We have an enormous deficit. Our government cannot and should not continue to spend money it doesn't have. Not even to serve a special interest.

Thompson tells us to put a face on the issues. What does that man think we've been doing since before MMA 2003? Year after year we've marched to the Hill and made the rounds trying to put a face on the issue and to really drive it home. And every year we've failed.

So I looked at what HomeCare Monday had to say about the bill; I'm going to start off by giving them a very black mark for quoting Rob Brant.

Thank you, Rob, for once again pointing out the obvious; the village idiot could figure out that the industry needs to get previous supporters signed on again, and that we need as many of the freshmen Reps as we can get too.

What would we do without you, Rob Brant? And thanks so much, HomeCare Monday, for turning to Brant for yet another vapid quote. I suppose I could be grateful that you didn't quote Tyler Wilson, but the truth is that though I think neither Brant nor Wilson is credible (or useful), Wilson has a tiny bit more standing than Brant.

Where's the Love?
The industry can probably get a decent number of supporters in the House. Unlike Senators, Representatives have districts, and so they have a smaller gene pool of voters to rely on for re-election. Representatives need to be more engaged because they can't pull voters from the whole state.

If this new bill doesn't get support in the Senate, it's as dead as last year's bill. So though AAHomecare, NAIMES, and the industry press are putting a positive spin on the legislation, the fact is that it's probable that we're going to get as far this year as we did last year.

Failure is still failure, and we don't appear to have any friends in the Senate.

One person quoted in HomeCare Monday said that there were 250 at the conference, but there should've been 2,500 there.

That may be true, but that conference is expensive, and in the end, it has never led the industry to any kind of victory. Yes, it's an event that has one portion designed to get attendees on the Hill to lobby. But where has that lobbying gotten us? Who among us can really afford to invest in something that offers no return? I see AAHomecare's legislative conference as a cash cow for the association. I've attended it, and I've lobbied during it, and nothing has changed.

So if AAHomecare isn't "feeling the love" through event attendance, it has only itself to blame.

The Warrior
I concede that the current effort has to be made. I do not, however, have any faith in our industry "leaders" to steer it to a successful end. It's their pesky track record, you see, that makes me look at them with a complete lack of confidence.

Giving feel-good, rah-rah snippets doesn't make me enthusiastic about our chances, because I see this maneuver as a rerun of previous identical maneuvers. I see this as doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.

As far as I can tell, AAHomecare still has no "hand" in D.C. I continue to see posers (I'm talking to you, Rob Brant) trying to appear worthy and intelligent (good luck with that). And I see too many state association leaders still mindlessly following and publicly supporting the agenda of AAHomecare; the one that's let us down again and again and again.

I prefer more backbone and more independent thinking in my state (or regional) association leaders, but it would appear that that is a very rare commodity. There are one or two out there who don't have the flock-of-sheep mentality (I've heard from some of its members that MESA has no problem telling AAHomecare what it thinks, and if that's true I wish it was a virus that others would catch), and at the end of the day, the members of the associations suffer from the failure of state leadership to take a stand and demand accountability of the ones presuming to lead in the national arena.

It's not true that a bad leader is better than no leader. We've had a decade of bad leadership, and the proof of that is where we find ourselves today. We need a warrior.


Under Pressure
"These are the days it never rains but it pours." We have to give ourselves one more chance, because to do nothing is to give up. But to do the same thing we did before -- and that resulted in failure -- isn't going to do the job. We need a Plan Z, and we need it fast. We shouldn't rely on just one action initiated by flawed leadership, or we'll waste yet another chance.

Like we can afford that.