Doctor Who Billed Medicare Over $16 Million in 2013 Explains It on YouTube

Last year, I had a very rare opportunity to congratulate the Obama Administration for its decision to release Medicare’s physician payment data for public scrutiny. It followed up quickly with a data dump of hospital claims.

I also anticipated that this would lead the physicians with the highest spending to justify their claims to the citizens at large. Last week, the Administration released the 2013 physician file, which is causing a this to happen. Here is one high-cost specialist explaining his practice on YouTube:

I discovered this thanks to USA Today, which has done a first cut of the 2013 dataset:

Spending on psychiatry was up 9.3%, to $853 million;

Sports medicine increased 56%, to $32 million;

Sleep medicine soared, as 100 new practitioners in the specialty received $7.2 million;

General practice was down 7.6% to $380 million.

(Megan Hoyer, et al., “Mental health spending up, new Medicare data shows,” USA Today, June 2, 2015)

The drop in spending on general practice is interesting in light of the general failure of Accountable Care Organizations to have a significant impact. If they had worked, spending on general practice would have increased, but spending on specialist care would have decreased.

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