The Medicare Advantage improper payment rate was 10 percent in 2016, which comes to $16.2 billion, a GAO official has testified.

This article first appeared July 08, 2017 on Kaiser Health News.

By Fred Schulte

Federal health officials made more than $16 billion in improper payments to private Medicare Advantage health plans last year and need to crack down on billing errors by the insurers, a top congressional auditor testified Wednesday.

James Cosgrove, who directs health care reviews for the Government Accountability Office, told the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee that the Medicare Advantage improper payment rate was 10 percent in 2016, which comes to $16.2 billion.

Adding in the overpayments for standard Medicare programs, the tally for last year approached $60 billion — which is almost twice as much as the National Institutes of Health spends on medical research each year.

“Fundamental changes are necessary” to improve how the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ferrets out billing mistakes and recoups overpayments from health insurers, he said.

Medicare serves about 56 million people, both those 65 and older and disabled people of any age. About 19 million have chosen to enroll in Medicare Advantage plans as an alternative to standard Medicare.

Federal officials predict the Medicare Advantage option will grow further as massive numbers of baby boomers retire in coming years.

Standard Medicare has a similar problem making accurate payments to doctors, hospitals and other health care providers, according to statistics presented at the hearing. Standard Medicare’s payment error rate was cited at 11 percent, or $41 billion for 2016.

Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the arrest of 412 people, some 100 doctors among them, in a scattershot of health care fraud schemes that allegedly ripped off the government for about $1.3 billion, mostly from Medicare.

CMS official Jonathan Morse said that the “largest contributors” to billing mistakes in standard Medicare were claims from home health care and inpatient rehabilitation facilities.

Some lawmakers appeared frustrated that CMS cannot say for sure how much of the “improper payments” in both Medicare options are caused by fraud. The agency uses the term broadly to cover billing fraud, waste and abuse, as well as simply overcharges and underpayments.

“When trying to understand how much fraud is in Medicare, the answer is simply we don’t know,” subcommittee Chairman Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) said.

Yet he added that “it doesn’t take a big percentage [of fraud] to get a giant number” of dollars.

CMS official Morse did little to clear up any confusion over billing mistakes. In his written testimony, he said that improper payments are “most often payments for which there is no or insufficient supporting documentation to determine whether the service … was medically necessary.”

In his testimony, GAO official Cosgrove focused on the Medicare Advantage program. He took aim at a little-known government audit process called Risk Adjustment Data Validation, or RADV. These audits require health plans to submit a sample of patient records for review.

Cosgrove said that the RADV audits take too long to complete and failed to focus on health plans with the greatest potential for recovery of overcharges. He also said that CMS officials had not done enough to make sure the payment data they use are accurate. As a result, “the soundness of billions of dollars in Medicare expenditures remains unsubstantiated,” according to written testimony.

The GAO, the watchdog arm of Congress, has previously criticized CMS for its failure to ferret out overcharges in Medicare Advantage. In an April report, GAO found that CMS has spent about $117 million on the Medicare Advantage audits since 2010 but recouped just under $14 million in total.

Payment errors and overcharges by Medicare Advantage plans were the subject of a lengthy investigation by Kaiser Health News and the Center for Public Integrity. Federal officials have struggled for years to weed out billing irregularities by Medicare Advantage plans, according to CMS records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Center for Public Integrity.

The investigation found that Medicare Advantage payment errors result mostly from flaws in a billing formula called a risk score. Congress expected risk scores would pay higher amounts for sicker patients and less for people in good health when it began phasing in the billing scales in 2004.

But since then, a wide range of CMS audits and other reviews have found that Medicare wastes billions of tax dollars annually because some health plans inflate risk scores by exaggerating how sick their patients are. One CMS memo made public through the FOIA lawsuit referred to risk-based payments as essentially an “honor system,” with few audits to curtail fraud and abuse.

Even when RADV audits have detected widespread overpayments, CMS officials have failed to recoup money after years of haggling with the health plans.

In January, Kaiser Health News reported that Medicare had potentially overpaid five Medicare Advantage health plans by $128 million in 2007, but under pressure from the insurance industry collected just $3.4 million and settled the cases.

Morse testified on Wednesday that CMS is still in the process of completing appeals of RADV audits from 2007. He said that payment errors have been calculated for 2011 and that reviews for 2012 and 2013 were underway.

These results are years behind schedule, according to CMS documents, which show the results were expected in early 2014. In the past, officials have said that they expected to collect as much as $370 million from the 2011 audits.

Morse said on Wednesday he didn’t know when the 2011 audit results would be released. “Hopefully soon,” he said after the hearing. “I actually don’t know.”

A draft report forecasting lower premiums for everyone who buys their own health insurance under a controversial amendment proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz drew immediate criticism Wednesday from health policy experts.

This article first appeared July 19, 2017 on Kaiser Health News.

By draft surfaced just as Republican senators were lunching with President Donald Trump on Wednesday to talk about the next steps in the health care debate.

“The Republicans never discuss how good their healthcare bill is, & it will get even better at lunchtime,” tweeted Trump, before the group convened.

But findings from the draft report drew immediate criticism from health policy experts as opaque and misleading.

“The details get a bit dicey,” said Craig Garthwaite, director of the health care program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “No one I’ve talked to thinks [the analysis] is well done.”

The forecasts in a draft analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services are exactly opposite from what many experts predict.

Still, the HHS analysis did provide some insight into how HHS envisioned that the Cruz plan, part of the Senate bill that appeared to die this week, could have worked. Particularly notable: The analysis assumes annual deductibles of $12,000, which means consumers would have to pay that amount — which is far higher than allowed under the ACA — before most benefits are covered.

On Wednesday, health care developments continued to unfold at a breakneck pace, and with a zigzagging trajectory, when the Senate Budget Committee posted on its website yet another bill. This one is an updated version of the 2015 “repeal and delay” bill, which is likely the measure the Senate will consider next week if a vote to start debate succeeds.

It would repeal all of the taxes that paid for the Affordable Care Act’s benefits, roll back the expansion of Medicaid (but not cap the underlying program), nullify the requirement for most people to have insurance and rescind the financial aid for low- and moderate-income Americans.

Late in the afternoon, the Congressional Budget Office released an updated estimate of an earlier analysis concluding that the new “repeal and delay” measure could result in 32 million fewer Americans having coverage and premiums doubling by 2026. By 2020, according to CBO, “about half the nation’s population would live in areas having no insurer participating in the non-group market.” The new bill does not include the Cruz amendment, the subject of the HHS report.

Opposition to the Cruz amendment from powerful health care sectors, like the insurance industry, is cited as one reason why the Senate was unable to muster enough votes to move the whole Senate bill forward for debate this week.

Last Friday, the insurance industry trade lobby sent a harsh warning to Congress, saying the Cruz amendment “is simply unworkable in any form and would undermine protections for those with pre-existing medical conditions, increase premiums and lead to widespread terminations of coverage.”

Today, the HHS report took a very different view.

First reported in the right-leaning Washington Examiner, it forecasts far more people covered by insurance in 2024 if the Cruz plan were adopted, as compared with how many would be insured under the Affordable Care Act.

It also projects premiums would fall, both in plans that meet all the rules of the ACA, and in plans Cruz proposes, which would not have to follow the rules. The Cruz plans would have lower premiums, however, because they could come with far fewer benefits — and could reject people with medical problems or charge them more.

Insurers and actuaries said the Cruz proposal would result in a segmented market, with younger and healthier people drawn to the skimpier, less expensive plans. That, in turn, would leave older or sicker enrollees in the ACA-compliant plans, causing their premiums to spiral upward.

But the analysis by HHS shows premium costs for ACA-compliant plans would go down by more than $250 a month in 2024 when compared with what they would be under current law. The Cruz plans would be super cheap, at under $200 a month under the rosiest scenario outlined.

Experts today immediately pounced on the department’s methods — in as much as they could be determined, since the full report was not released.

(HHS did not respond to requests for comment or for the release of the full report.)

For starters, the draft report, they say, compares premiums for a 40-year-old with the “weighted average” of all people of all ages purchasing ACA plans now.

“It’s not apples to apples,” said Matt Fiedler, a fellow at the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Innovation in Health Policy.

It cited its own “proprietary model” used to determine how many people would switch from ACA plans to the new Cruz plans, without spelling out its assumptions. Not including such details is highly unusual and makes the results difficult to analyze, said Garthwaite, adding: “There’s nothing in this that gives me any hope that the entire report will be any more accurate, complete or unbiased.”

Meanwhile, over lunch at the White House, President Trump asked senators to skip all or part of their August recess in order to work on another proposal to repeal and replace the ACA. He promised premiums that would be significantly lower, without citing details on how that would occur.

In retrospect, Republicans’ inability to overhaul the health law should not come as much of a surprise.

This article first appeared July 18, 2017 on Kaiser Health News.

By Julie Rovner

Seven years of Republican vows to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act came to a crashing halt Tuesday, when it became clear that the Senate could not muster the necessary votes for any of three separate proposals that have been under consideration.

The failure, at least for now, breaks one of the key promises Republicans have made to their voters since 2010, when the ACA first became law.

“This has been a very challenging experience for all of us,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “It’s pretty clear that there are not 50 Republicans at the moment to vote for a replacement for Obamacare.”

Monday night’s declaration of opposition by conservative Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) effectively scotched even the chance to start debate on the version of a bill unveiled last week.

McConnell added that the Senate would vote early next week on a plan, originally approved in 2015 and vetoed by President Barack Obama, that would repeal parts of the health law. That approach would delay the effective date for two years to give lawmakers time to come up with a replacement.

However, the opposition of moderate Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), ensures that vote will fail, too.

“To just say ‘repeal and trust us, we’re going to fix it in a couple of years,’ that’s not going to provide comfort to the anxiety a lot of Alaskan families are feeling right now,” Murkowski told reporters.

In retrospect, Republicans’ inability to overhaul the health law should not come as much of a surprise. Here are some of the reasons:

1. It’s hard to take things away from people.

Once launched, federal programs that provide people with benefits they find important and valuable are very difficult to rescind. In the case of health care, people’s lives can be at stake. In the current debate, patients who feared what would happen to their health coverage made their concerns known — loudly — to lawmakers.

2. Republicans have long been divided on health care.

Republicans’ dirty little secret the past seven years is that the only thing they fundamentally agreed on when it comes to health care was the slogan “repeal and replace.” There’s a reason they failed to have a plan ready when Donald Trump was elected president — all efforts to reach a consensus had thus far failed.

“I did not come to Washington to hurt people,” said Capito in a statement. “I have serious concerns about how we continue to provide affordable care to those who have benefited from West Virginia’s decision to expand Medicaid.”

But the more conservative members, notably Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), have other priorities. “All of us promised we would repeal Obamacare,” Paul told reporters Tuesday. “If you’re not willing to vote the way you voted in 2015 then you need to go back home and you need to explain to Republicans why you’re no longer for repealing Obamacare.”

3. Presidential leadership on hard issues is important.

President Trump has been all over the place in what he said he wanted from a health bill. It was his original insistence that “repeal and replace” happen simultaneously that moved Congress away from its 2015 strategy of repealing first and replacing later. He hosted a celebration in the White House Rose Garden when the House passed its bill, then subsequently called the measure “mean” during a strategy meeting with Senators.

When it became clear Monday night that the Senate effort was foundering, Trump tweeted: “Republicans should just REPEAL failing ObamaCare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate.” But within hours he instead suggested, “As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan.”

The president “gave them an impossible assignment with his promises (more, better, cheaper for all) and neither policy nor bully pulpit help at crunch time,” said Len Nichols, a professor of health policy at George Mason University. “And now he’ll blame them for failing.”

Added Thomas Miller, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute: “We now have a randomized clinical trial that proves one cannot lead and govern via Twitter.”

4. Health care is complicated. Really.

Health care has not traditionally been a major voting issue for Republicans, and thus it has been a low priority — compared with issues like taxes and trade — for the officials they elect.

Adding to the complexity is that the Republicans’ bench is nowhere near as deep as the Democrats’ when it comes to health policy expertise. Democrats have toiled on these issues for years. Even before the Affordable Care Act, many had served in Congress for decades and learned from the mistakes that were made on efforts like the failed health bill under President Bill Clinton.

5. Some parts of the ACA really are popular, even among Republicans.

The requirement for most people to have insurance or else pay a fine — the individual mandate — has consistently been unpopular among voters of all political stripes. But many other major provisions of the health law, such as guaranteeing coverage for people with preexisting conditions, remain broadly popular.

In fact, in recent months, the Affordable Care Act has been growing in popularity. Most polls show it more than twice as popular as GOP efforts to overhaul it.

“Republicans have to admit that some of the things in the ACA, we actually liked,” said Murkowski.

That left a huge gap between Republicans who wanted to maintain the popular benefits and those who wanted to repeal the law entirely. A gap that, so far, Republicans have been unable to bridge.

Rachel Bluth contributed to this story.

California is one of a handful of states that publicly reports surgeons’ names and risk-adjusted death rates on a procedure known as the “isolated coronary artery bypass graft."

This article first appeared July 17, 2017 on Kaiser Health News.

By Anna Gorman

Michael Koumjian, a heart surgeon for nearly three decades, said he considered treating the sickest patients a badge of honor. The San Diego doctor was frequently called upon to operate on those who had multiple illnesses or who’d undergone CPR before arriving at the hospital.

Recently, however, Koumjian received some unwelcome recognition: He was identified in a public database of California heart surgeons as one of seven with a higher-than-average death rate for patients who underwent a common bypass procedure.

“If you are willing to give people a shot and their only chance is surgery, then you are going to have more deaths and be criticized," said Koumjian, whose risk-adjusted death rate was 7.5 per 100 surgeries in 2014-15. “The surgeons that worry about their stats just don’t take those cases."

Now, Koumjian said he is reconsidering taking such complicated cases because he can’t afford to continue being labeled a “bad surgeon."

California is one of a handful of states — including New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey — that publicly reports surgeons’ names and risk-adjusted death rates on a procedure known as the “isolated coronary artery bypass graft." The practice is controversial: Proponents argue transparency improves quality and informs consumers. Critics say it deters surgeons from accepting complex cases and can unfairly tarnish doctors’ records.

“This is a hotly debated issue," said Ralph Brindis, a cardiologist and professor at UC-San Francisco who chairs the advisory panel for the state report. “But to me, the pros of public reporting outweigh the negatives. I think consumers deserve to have a right to that information."

Prompted by a state law, the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development began issuing the reports in 2003 and produces them every two years. Outcomes from the bypass procedure had long been used as one of several measures of hospital quality. But that marked the first time physician names were attached — and the bypass is still the only procedure for which such physician-specific reports are released publicly in California.

California’s law was sponsored by consumer advocates, who argued that publicly listing the names of outlier surgeons in New York had appeared to bring about a significant drop in death rates from the bypass procedure. State officials say it has worked here as well: The rate declined from 2.91 to 1.97 deaths per 100 surgeries from 2003 to 2014.

“Providing the results back to the surgeons, facilities and the public overall results in higher quality performance for everybody," said Holly Hoegh, manager of the clinical data unit at the state’s health planning and development office.

Since the state began issuing the reports, the number of surgeons with significantly higher death rates than the state average has ranged from six to 12, and none has made the list twice. The most recent report, released in May, is based on surgeries performed in 2013 and 2014.

In this year’s report, the seven surgeons with above-average death rates — out of 271 surgeons listed — include several veterans in the field. Among them were Daniel Pellegrini, chief of inpatient quality at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco and John M. Robertson, director of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica. Most defended their records, arguing that some of the deaths shouldn’t have been counted or that the death rates didn’t represent the totality of their careers. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

“For the lion’s share of my career, my numbers were good and I’m very proud of them," said Pellegrini. “I don’t think this is reflective of my work overall. I do think that’s reflective that I was willing to take on tough cases."

During the two years covered in the report, Pellegrini performed 69 surgeries and four patients died. That brought his risk-adjusted rate to 11.48 deaths per 100, above the state average of 2.13 per 100 in that period.

Pellegrini said he supports public reporting, but he argues the calculations don’t fully take the varying complexity of the cases into account and that a couple of bad outcomes can skew the rates.

Robertson said in a written statement that he had three very “complex and challenging" cases involving patients who came to the hospital with “extraordinary complications and additional unrelated conditions." They were among five deaths out of 71 patients during the reporting period, giving him an adjusted rate of 9.75 per 100 surgeries.

“While I appreciate independent oversight, it’s important for consumers to realize that two years of data do not illustrate overall results," Robertson said. “Every single patient is different."

The rates are calculated based on a nationally recognized method that includes deaths occurring during hospitalization, regardless of how long the stay, or anytime within 30 days after the surgery, regardless of the venue. All licensed hospitals must report the data to the state.

State officials said that providing surgeons’ names can help consumers make choices about who they want to operate on them, assuming it’s not an emergency.

“It is important for patients to be involved in their own health care, and we are trying to work more and more on getting this information in an easy-to-use format for the man on the street," said Hoegh, of the state’s health planning and development office.

No minimum number of surgeries is needed to calculate a rate, but the results must be statistically significant and are risk-adjusted to account for varying levels of illness or frailty among patients, Hoegh said.

She acknowledged that “a risk model can never capture all the risk" and said her office is always trying to improve its approach.

Surgeons sometimes file appeals — arguing, for example, that the risk was improperly calculated or that the death was unrelated to the surgery. The appeals can result in adjustments to a rate, Hoegh said.

Despite the controversy it generates, the public reporting is supported by the California Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the professional association representing the surgeons. No one wants to be on the list, but “transparency is always a good thing," said Junaid Khan, president of the society and director of cardiovascular surgery at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in the Bay Area.

“The purpose of the list is not to be punitive," said Khan. “It’s not to embarrass anybody. It is to help improve quality."

Khan added that he believes outcomes of other heart procedures, such as angioplasty, should also be publicly reported.

Consumers Union, which sponsored the bill that led to the cardiac surgeon reports, supports expanding doctor-specific reporting to include a variety of other procedures — for example, birth outcomes, which could be valuable for expectant parents as they look for a doctor.

“Consumers are really hungry for physician-specific information," said Betsy Imholz, the advocacy group’s special projects director. And, she added, “care that people receive actually improves once the data is made public."

But efforts to expand reporting by name are likely to hit opposition. Officials in Massachusetts, who had been reporting bypass outcomes for individual doctors, stopped doing it in 2013. Surgeons supported reporting to improve outcomes, but they were concerned that they were being identified publicly as outliers when they really were just taking on difficult cases, said Daniel Engelman, president of the Massachusetts Society of Thoracic Surgeons.

“Cardiac surgeons said, ‘Enough is enough. We can’t risk being in the papers as outliers,’" Engelman said.

Engelman said the surgeons cited research from New York showing that public reporting may have led surgeons to turn away high-risk patients. Hoegh said research has not uncovered any such evidence in California.

In addition to Koumjian, Robertson and Pellegrini, the physicians in California with higher-than-average rates were Philip Faraci, Eli R. Capouya, Alexander R. Marmureanu, Yousef M. Odeh. Capouya declined to comment.

Faraci, 75, said his rate (8.34 per 100) was based on four deaths out of 33 surgeries, not enough to calculate death rates, he said. Faraci, who is semi-retired, said he wasn’t too worried about the rating, though. “I have been in practice for over 30 years and I have never been published as a below-average surgeon before," he said.

Odeh, 45, performed 10 surgeries and had two deaths while at Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital in Whittier, resulting in a mortality rate of 26.17 per 100. “It was my first job out of residency, and I didn’t have much guidance," Odeh said. “That’s a recipe for disaster."

Odeh said those two years don’t reflect his skills as a surgeon, adding that he has done hundreds of surgeries since then without incident.

Marmureanu, who operates at several Los Angeles-area hospitals, had a mortality rate of 18.04 based on three deaths among 22 cases. “I do the most complicated cases in town," he said, adding that one of the patients died later after being hit by a car.

"Hospital patients don’t care" about the report," he said. "Nobody pays attention to this data other than journalists."