![]() But increasingly, reimbursement is not based on such prevailing rates. Cuomo said Ingenix had consistently understated local “usual and customary” rates - so-called U.C.R.’s - that were used nationally to determine how much of a bill was paid when a patient used an out-of-network doctor.įair Health collects billions of bills from insurers to calculate a usual fee for each medical procedure in a given locality. But they paid to set up Fair Health as a replacement for Ingenix, a database owned by the insurance giant United Healthcare. In the 2009 settlement, the insurers did not admit wrongdoing. Cuomo when he was attorney general, is seeking legislation in New York State to require that minimum reimbursements be linked to the new database, known as Fair Health. The switch “certainly creates the appearance that insurers are trying to end-run the settlement and keep out-of-network payments low,” Mr. Lawsky, the superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, whose investigators recently found that under the switch, 4.7 million New York State residents - 76 percent of those with out-of-network coverage - are facing reimbursement reductions of 50 percent or more. “They’re not getting what they think they’re paying for,” said Benjamin M. They say that premiums would be even costlier if reimbursements were more generous, and that exorbitant doctors’ fees are largely to blame.īut few dispute that as the nation debates an overhaul aimed at insuring everybody, the new realpolitik of reimbursement is leaving millions of insured families more vulnerable to catastrophic medical bills, even though they are paying higher premiums, co-payments and deductibles. Insurance companies defend the shift toward Medicare-based rates under the settlement, which allowed any clear, objective method of calculating reimbursement. “I could get balance-billed hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I have no protection.” “It’s deplorable,” said Chad Glaser, a sales manager for a seafood company near Buffalo, who learned that he was facing hundreds of dollars more in out-of-pocket costs for his son’s checkups with a specialist who had performed a lifesaving liver transplant. So by the time the database was finally up and running last year, the same companies, across the country, were rapidly shifting to another calculation method, based on Medicare rates, that usually reduces reimbursement substantially. Though the settlement required the companies to underwrite the new database with $95 million, it did not obligate them to use it. Cuomo, then the attorney general, said it would increase reimbursements by as much as 28 percent. The agreement required the companies to finance an objective database of doctors’ fees that patients and insurers nationally could rely on. The settlement, reached in 2009, followed New York State’s accusation that the companies manipulated data they used to price such care, shortchanging the nation’s patients by hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite a landmark settlement that was expected to increase coverage for out-of-network care, the nation’s largest health insurers have been switching to a new payment method that in most cases significantly increases the cost to the patient. ![]()
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