Supplemental Oxygen Reform Access (SOAR)

Persons with LAM, and oxygen users across the country, need your help to pass much-needed oxygen reform.

Unfortunately, Congress put off passing a healthcare bill that would include the SOAR bill until March 15, 2025. The members of Congress who introduced the bill last year are committed to introducing them again. We’ll share the bill numbers once they are introduced so you can start contacting your members of Congress again.

What Is the SOAR Act?

This bill is based on 4 pillars of oxygen reform:

  1. Ensure supplemental oxygen is patient-centric
    • Change “home oxygen” to “supplemental oxygen” to ensure people requiring oxygen can live full lives outside their primary residence
    • Create a patient’s bill of rights to ensure care is focused on patient needs
  2. Ensure access to liquid oxygen for patients for whom it is medically necessary
  3. Create a statutory service element to provide adequate reimbursement for respiratory therapists to ensure patients have access to their expertise
  4. To ensure predictable and adequate reimbursement and to protect against fraud and abuse, establish national standardized documentation requirements that rely upon a template rather than prescriber medical records to support claims for supplemental oxygen suppliers

Why Is the SOAR Act Needed?

Liquid oxygen has mostly disappeared across the United States. It is the best form of oxygen for those with high-flow needs. High flow is considered 4 liters per minute or more. Liquid oxygen is lighter and lasts longer than the tanks people commonly use. Because of Medicare reimbursement policies initiated in 2011, there has been an 89% decline in patients receiving liquid oxygen. You can read more about this impact: Medicare policy on supplemental oxygen has forced some patients to retreat from life.

You can also read a published story about Colleen, a 55-year-old mother with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) who has been on supplemental oxygen since 2007. Like LAM patients in the severe stages, not only has Colleen lost access to liquid oxygen, she is now limited to only being able to leave her house for 14 hours a week because her oxygen supply company won’t give her the number of tanks she needs: Patients Seek Reforms to Supplemental Oxygen Access and Regulations.

 

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