Medicare Advantage continues to steal from taxpayers [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/08/07/15216/how-medicare-advantage-plans-code-cash

A new federal study shows that many Medicare Advantage health plans routinely overbill the government for treating elderly patients — and have gotten away with doing it for years.

Analyzing government data never before made public, Department of Health and Human Services researchers found that many plans exaggerate how sick their patients are and how much they cost to treat. Medicare expects to pay the privately run plans — an alternative to traditional Medicare — some $160 billion this year.

The HHS study does not directly accuse any insurers of wrongdoing or name specific plans that were scrutinized. But the researchers offer the most comprehensive evidence to date that suspect billing practices have been common across much of the Medicare Advantage industry and are likely to get worse unless officials crack down.

Medicare pays the Advantage health plans higher rates for sicker patients and less for healthy people using a complex formula called a “risk score.” But the HHS study spells out several ways health plans have inflated those scores, from reporting implausibly high levels of medical conditions such as alcohol or drug dependence to billing for an inordinately high number of patients with complications of diabetes.

Despite its broad implications for Medicare spending, the study by HHS researchers Richard Kronick and W. Pete Welch has attracted scant notice in Washington. It was quietly posted late last month on an online research site run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of HHS.

Kronick directs the HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, whose mission is to improve health care delivery. Welch works for the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.

Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: We have discussed before the ways in which the private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans have been cheating the taxpayers, including cheating the beneficiaries in the traditional Medicare program who are paying higher premiums to support these private MA plans. Today’s message is especially significant since it cites a detailed 19 page report from the director of AHRQ and his colleague - a report which further confirms the private insurers’ distortion of Hierarchical Condition Categories (HCC) to receive extra risk adjustment payments based on upcoding that reports their patients as being more ill than they actually are (i.e., they pad the diagnoses).

The history of Medicare Advantage is that of a steady string of abuses. The program began with overpayments of about 14 percent over the cost of caring for Medicare patients in the traditional program. That overpayment was a deliberate ploy of Congress to give the private plans a competitive market advantage in an effort to privatize Medicare. The plans then selectively enrolled healthier, less expensive patients through deceptive marketing practices. When an effort to correct this favorable selection was made through risk adjustment using Hierarchical Condition Categories, the insurers then padded the diagnoses, as mentioned above. Further, since the Affordable Care Act included adjustments to correct the overpayments, the insurance industry heavily lobbied Congress and the Obama Administration to use three years of accounting gimmicks to reduce the impact of these adjustments. Cheat, cheat, cheat.

What can we expect now? Richard Kronick and W. Pete Welch are reserved in their language when they state, in a footnote, “Some would expect that MA plans will react to the 2013 and 2014 model changes by finding other HCCs on which to focus their efforts, and the success of coding intensity efforts may well increase in the future.”

I’ll be more frank. These crooks will continue to cheat the American taxpayers. They will surely use other HCCs to upcode their patients, until that door is finally slammed shut. What then? The private insurers continually tout to their shareholders the importance of “innovation” in health care coverage. They will always be able to find new and more effective ways to cheat us.