About this episode
Matt Daus, chair of the transportation practice group at Windels Marx in New York and a former decade-long commissioner of the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission, expects audits to be the first thing NEMT providers feel from Washington. Federal and state inspectors general will go after the Medicaid and Medicare money flowing into the industry, and Daus warns that innocent paperwork errors are enough to trigger expensive scrutiny. The upside is the FTA taxi exemption, which forces a passenger to consent trip by trip to a vehicle without drug and alcohol testing, and which he puts at roughly 90 percent likely to be revisited.
Key takeaways
- A dated federal study Daus ran found an average $15 cab trip against $60 in subsidies for 1.5 passengers on a paratransit van. That gap is the pitch to transit agencies.
- Worker classification is the quiet trap. Training and even a dress code that no regulator requires can be argued in court as indicia of control over independent contractor drivers.
- A regulator mandate defuses that. If a licensing body requires driver training, Daus says the requirement cannot be used against a provider as evidence of employment control.
- The disruption is three-fold: Uber and Lyft moving into healthcare, dispatch software vendors circling the broker role, and taxi fleets surviving on airport runs and NEMT work.
- The IATR is rewriting accessibility model regulations that are more than a decade old and weighing whether NEMTAC certification should be encouraged, mandated, or treated as a licensing shortcut.
Chapters
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:25 Background of Matt Daus
- 3:57 New White House administration impacts to NEMT
- 10:21 Government cuts and its impact to NEMT
- 13:02 How NEMT businesses can weather the new legal storm
- 18:02 Big disruptors to the NEMT industry
- 22:18 How NEMT business stay ahead of disruption
- 30:50 Uber and Lyft in NEMT
- 34:31 Business practices to be profitable in NEMT
- 37:21 Conclusion
- 38:58 RUN BAMBI RUN!!
