The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has proposed a dangerous new rule that would add urological, ostomy, and tracheostomy supplies to its competitive bidding program.
That may sound like a boring bureaucratic adjustment. It is not — the effects of the change could jeopardize American patients, destroy small U.S. medical suppliers, and open the floodgates to cheap, low-quality Chinese imports into our healthcare system.
This is exactly the kind of backdoor Washington regulatory scheme President Donald Trump fought to eliminate. It is bad for patients, bad for innovation, and bad for America.
CMS’s competitive bidding program was designed to control costs for off-the-shelf medical equipment such as wheelchairs or oxygen tanks. Under this system, suppliers “bid” to provide products to Medicare recipients. The lowest qualified bids win, and those few selected suppliers become the only ones allowed to serve patients in a given area.
In theory, this lowers costs. In practice, it often creates monopoly-style supply chains, eliminates competition, and reduces product quality.
Now CMS wants to apply that same system to urological and ostomy supplies. These are products used internally by patients recovering from cancer, living with spinal cord injuries, or managing lifelong medical conditions.
These are not commodity items. They are prosthetics. The fit, material, and compatibility of these products are critical to avoiding painful infections, hospitalizations, and even death.
CMS is trying to justify this move by pointing to a recent Medicare fraud case in which scammers billed over $10 billion in fake catheter claims. The criminals behind that scheme used stolen identities and phantom suppliers to exploit the system. Instead of fixing the fraud with targeted enforcement, CMS proposes punishing the patients who rely on these devices and the legitimate businesses that serve them.
This is the wrong solution. And it creates an even bigger problem.
If CMS moves forward, the U.S. market for these supplies will become a race to the bottom, which is precisely when Chinese manufacturers will step in. These companies are already flooding global markets with low-cost catheters and disposable medical goods. They can offer rock-bottom prices because they do not follow the same safety or quality rules as American companies. Once CMS starts choosing suppliers based only on price, those Chinese imports will dominate the bidding process.
That means American jobs will be lost. Family-owned suppliers who have spent decades helping patients find the right medical devices will be forced out of the market. The United States will become more dependent on Beijing for the critical supplies our seniors and veterans use every day.
Trump spent four years working to bring medical manufacturing back to the U.S. and to secure our supply chains from China. The COVID-19 pandemic showed how dangerous it is to rely on adversarial nations for basic equipment such as masks, gloves, and ventilators. Now CMS wants to undo that progress by letting Chinese bidders undercut our companies for the most personal, life-sustaining medical supplies patients rely on.
This is not just bad policy. It is a betrayal of every American who believes in medical freedom, small business, and putting America first.
There are smarter ways to stop fraud in Medicare. CMS should invest in real-time analytics, identity verification tools, and better supplier vetting. Turning over our prosthetic supply chains to the lowest bidder is reckless. These suppliers will likely be foreign, unvetted, and focused solely on profit, not patient care.
If this rule goes into effect, it will harm the very people Medicare is supposed to protect. Older Americans, veterans, people with disabilities, and patients in rural communities will be the first to suffer. Most will not even know what has changed until their supplies stop arriving or they receive a product that causes pain or infection because it does not fit.
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Dr. Mehmet Oz has spoken often about protecting patient dignity and preserving choice. Trump led the way in fighting bureaucratic overreach and defending American-made products. This CMS rule is counter to both of those principles.
The rule change should be withdrawn immediately; if CMS does not reverse course, Congress must step in and stop it.
Aiden Buzzetti is the president of the Bull Moose Project.
