Funds Medicare Pays to Doctors are Secret
Did you know the government is spending $62.5 billion annually on government contracts and the public was barred from knowing to whom the money was going? The CIA? NSA? Blackwater contractors? Special ops missions? No. None of these. It’s health care.
That’s how much Medicare pays physicians who treat Medicare patients. Yet the American Medical Association successfully sued the government decades ago to keep the amounts paid to specific providers a secret — making it difficult to tackle fraud, waste and abuse. Austin Frakt of The Incidental Economist also weighs in on the topic.
It’s rather amazing that so much of our tax dollars is spent and we can’t know where the money goes.
I’m with Vicki. This is scandalous.
Private health insurers have all manner of proprietary algorithms to detect fraud and identify providers with irregular billing patterns. Yet, Medicare, which is the biggest health care payer, cannot disclose where its money is going. What Medicare supposedly saves with low administrative costs is offset by waste and fraud that goes undetected.