- Center on Health Equity & Access
- Clinical
- Health Care Cost
- Health Care Delivery
- Insurance
- Policy
- Technology
- Value-Based Care
Wasteful Services Cost Medicare Up to $8.5 Billion, Study Estimates
One in four Medicare patients got medical care at least once in 2009 that provided no benefit at a total cost of at least $1.9 billion, newly published research suggests.
One in four Medicare patients got medical care at least once in 2009 that provided no benefit at a total cost of at least $1.9 billion, newly published research suggests.
The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, estimated the cost of overuse for more than two dozen cancer screening, imaging, diagnostic, preventive or preoperative testing services and found it totaled 0.6% of Medicare spending.
Researchers, however, also ran a second, wider analysis to capture wasteful services excluded under the initial model but with the potential to include some appropriate care as well. The broader evaluation found a significantly higher number of Medicare patients received care that did no good, 42%, at a much higher cost, $8.5 billion, or 2.7% of the program's overall spending.
Read the full story here: http://bit.ly/1uZ5p9V
Source: Modern Healthcare
Managed Care Reflections: A Q&A With A. Mark Fendrick, MD, and Michael E. Chernew, PhD
December 2nd 2025To mark the 30th anniversary of The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), each issue in 2025 includes a special feature: reflections from a thought leader on what has changed—and what has not—over the past 3 decades and what’s next for managed care. The December issue features a conversation with AJMC Co–Editors in Chief A. Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design and a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Read More
