MO Medicaid Re-Instates Payment for Orthotic Devices

The Missouri State Legislature has just re-instated payment for orthotic devices, which it stripped from coverage in 2005 in a rash of cuts to the program. A judge ruled last year that Missouri violated federal law in its arbitrary decisions to cover some devices and not others. Just this week, P & O Care received the new fee schedule from Medicaid, outlining how much they will pay for custom braces, boots and shoes, and other orthotic devices.

In 2005, the Missouri State Legislature was also ready to cut prosthetics from Medicaid coverage, but citizens from across the state called their legislators and P & O Care’s Clinical Director Jon Wilson, CPO, our CEO, Jim Weber, and one of our patients testified before a legislative committee. At the time, the trade journal O&P Almanac reported that it was their testimony that saved prosthetic coverage for Medicaid recipients, but unfortunately orthotic coverage was still stripped.

This decision led to the bizarre situation in which Missouri would pay thousands of dollars for a prosthesis but would not pay a few hundred dollars for a custom boot that could have prevented the amputation. Now two years later, we’re thankful that they’ve finally decided to pay for both.

Technician Profile: Mark “Doc” Woodson

Doc’s been there from the beginning. P & O Care’s Lead Technician opened the company in 2002 with Jim Weber, Jon Wilson, and Wanda Stephens. Since then, we’ve grown to almost twenty employees and seven practitioners, several of whom Doc has trained. He taught our prosthetists Greg Doerr and Manny Rivera how to fabricate artificial limbs back when they were first getting into the field, and right now he’s training intern Luke Brewer before he goes off to Northwestern Medical School’s prosthetic and orthotic program in Chicago. Doc leads our team of technicians, whom patients rarely see but who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure their limbs get done on time, fit right, and look spectacular.

Doc got into prosthetics back in the early Nineties, a few years after loosing his leg below the knee in a trucking accident. He always enjoyed creating things with his hands and helping people, so he was a perfect fit for fabricating prosthetic limbs. Doc says he gets special enjoyment from making the limbs our pediatric patients use to walk. A single father, he and his son love to take road trips out West, often deciding each day where to go next. Doc also has a special knack for numbers and has become better than anyone else at P & O Care at predicting our monthly billing based on the devices in fabrication. Always competitive and ambitious—and incredibly funny—Doc drives all of us to continually improve the quality of care we provide our patients.