One of the more popular strategies in Washington for reducing healthcare spending is to uncover fraudulent operators who bilk Medicare
For public and private payers together, the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association (NHCAA) calculates that fraud costs the system between $75 billion and $250 billion a year.
Even more damaging is the harm to patients, NHCAA Executive Director Louis Saccoccio told the House Ways & Means Committee. Individuals often fail to get needed care or may receive harmful or unnecessary treatment from providers looking to overcharge healthcare systems.
Yet the payoff so far is just the "tip of the iceberg," say the legislators and prosecutors. And organized crime appears to be moving into healthcare fraud, attracted by the large volume of spending on healthcare and the ease of bilking the system.
Upended: Can PBM Transparency Succeed?
March 6th 2024Simmering tensions in the pharmacy benefit management (PBM) industry have turned into fault lines. The PBMs challenging the "big three" have formed a trade association. Purchaser coalitions want change. The head of the industry's trade group says inherent marketplace friction has spilled over into political friction.
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In this episode of the "Meet the Board" podcast series, Briana Contreras, Managed Healthcare Executive editor, speaks with Ateev Mehrotra, a member of the MHE editorial advisory board and a professor of healthcare policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School. Mehtrotra is also a hospitalist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. In the discussion, Contreras gets to know Mehrotra more on a personal level and picks his brain on some of his research interests including telehealth, alternative payment models and price transparency.
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Inflation Reduction Act: Reforms to Patient Cost-Sharing
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Spending climbed by 2.7% in 2021. In 2020, it soared by 10.3%, fueled by federal government spending in response to the pandemic. The blizzard of calculations of 2021 healthcare spending by CMS’ actuaries also provides further evidence that utilization of healthcare services bounced back in 2021.
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