Insurers Pocketed $50 Billion From Medicare for Diseases No Doctor Treated

July 8, 2024

Close up of 100-dollar bills

(Wall Street Journal) – Private insurers involved in the government’s Medicare Advantage program made hundreds of thousands of questionable diagnoses that triggered extra taxpayer-funded payments from 2018 to 2021, including outright wrong ones like Lee’s, a Wall Street Journal analysis of billions of Medicare records found.

The questionable diagnoses included some for potentially deadly illnesses, such as AIDS, for which patients received no subsequent care, and for conditions people couldn’t possibly have, the analysis showed. Often, neither the patients nor their doctors had any idea. (Read More)