The private insurers are shifting the costs of fraud to us

July 22, 2019

Topics: Quote of the Day

By Marshall Allen
ProPublica, July 19, 2019

Health insurers are regarded as fierce defenders of health care dollars. But the case of David Williams shows one reason America’s health care costs continue to rise. The personal trainer spent years posing as a doctor and billing the nation’s top insurers, making off with millions.

There are a host of reasons health care costs are out-of-control and routinely top American’s list of financial worries, from unnecessary treatment and high prices to waste and fraud. Most people assume their insurance companies are tightly controlling their health care dollars. Insurers themselves boast of this on their websites.

In 2017, private insurance spending hit $1.2 trillion, according to the federal government, yet no one tracks how much is lost to fraud. Some investigators and health care experts estimate that fraud eats up 10% of all health care spending, and they know schemes abound.

Williams’ case highlights an unsettling reality about the nation’s health insurance system: It is surprisingly easy for fraudsters to gain entry, and it is shockingly difficult to convince insurance companies to stop them.

Williams’ spree also lays bare the financial incentives that drive the system: Rising health care costs boost insurers’ profits. Policing criminals eats away at them. Ultimately, losses are passed on to their clients through higher premiums and out-of-pocket fees or reduced coverage.

Insurance companies “are more focused on their bottom line than ferreting out bad actors,” said Michael Elliott, former lead attorney for the Medicare Fraud Strike Force in North Texas.

(This article provides details on the extensive acts of insurance fraud committed by David Williams for which he was eventually convicted, but. more importantly, it shows the lack of diligent responsiveness on the part of insurers in spite of repeated notifications of the extent of his fraud. – DMc)

Many health care experts and fraud investigators said they weren’t surprised to hear that insurers were slow to stop even such an outlandish case of fraud.

“It’s just not worth it to them,” said Dr. Eric Bricker, an internist who spent years running a company that advised employers who self-funded their insurance.

For insurance behemoths pulling in billions, or hundreds of billions, in revenue, fraud that sucks away mere millions is not even a rounding error, he said.

And perhaps counterintuitively, insurance companies are loath to offend physicians and hospitals in their all-important networks — even those accused of wrongdoing, many experts have said. They attract new clients by providing access to their networks.

This ambivalence toward fraud, Bricker and others said, is no secret. Scammers like Williams are “emblematic of gazillions of people doing variants of the same thing,” Bricker said. Insurers embolden them by using a catch-and-release approach to fraud, in which the insurers identify criminals, then let them go.

Joe Christensen has pursued fraud for both government and commercial insurers, serving as a director in Aetna’s Special Investigations Unit, a team of more than 100 people ferreting out fraud, from 2013 to 2018 and as the director of Utah’s insurance fraud division for 13 years. Fraud in government programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, gets more publicity, he said, and has dedicated arms of agencies pursuing fraudsters. But the losses may be even greater in the commercial market because the dollar levels are higher, he said.

Some commercial insurers take a passive approach, Christensen said, in part because it’s expensive to press a fraud case. At Aetna, he said, investigators would identify cases of apparent fraud, but it was up to the executives and legal team to decide how to handle them. Taking fraudsters to civil or criminal court requires resources, so the company often settled for trying to get repaid through settlements or blocking a suspect provider from billing, he said.

Christensen said while he was at Aetna, investigators almost never sought to partner with law enforcement agencies to pursue criminal cases.

ProPublica asked Aetna how many criminal cases it had pursued in 2017 and 2018. A company official said the question could not be answered because it does not track such cases.

Williams’ trial began in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Without irony, the prosecutor, P.J. Meitl, argued that Williams had preyed on a health insurance system that relies “on trust, relies on honesty” when it pays claims.

He called fraud investigators from Aetna, Cigna and United, who testified that their companies auto-pay millions of claims a year. It’s not cost effective to check them, they said. “Aetna relies on the honesty of the person submitting the claim verifying that it’s true,” testified Kathy Richer, a supervisor in Aetna’s Special Investigations Unit.

Insurers promote themselves as guardians of health care dollars. United says on its website it wants to “help employers manage” medical expenses, resulting in “lower costs.” Aetna promises employers “affordability.” Cigna promises “increased savings.”

But private health insurers allow so much fraud that prosecutors use an idiom to describe the rare person who gets caught: “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”

“Pigs” can steal millions, if they bill just enough to avoid notice. But if they get greedy and bill too many millions, they “become a data outlier,” said Elliott, the former fraud task force prosecutor. “You get slaughtered.”

Williams took years to reach hog status.

Part of the problem, experts say, is that health care fraud is often misunderstood as shafting greedy insurers — not the folks paying for health insurance. Ultimately, insurers don’t bear the cost. For their self-funded clients, like Southwest, they merely process the claims. For their traditionally insured clients, they can recover any losses by increasing deductibles and premiums and decreasing coverage.

https://www.propublica.org…

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Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

One of the arguments frequently made against single payer Medicare for All is that fraud and abuse are rampant in Medicare and that alone would make expanded Medicare unaffordable. It is known that Medicare fraud does occur, especially since we keep reading about it, and it is reported in the media because our public stewards are more diligent at ferreting it out and rectifying it. What this article contributes is an understanding that fraud is rampant in the plans administered by the private insurers, but that there is a deliberate effort to turn a blind eye to the problem.

Fraud in taxpayer-funded government programs quite appropriately creates public outrage and is not tolerated. Fraud in private insurance programs is just a cost of doing business. It does not harm the insurers since the costs are born by the purchasers of the plans in the form of higher premiums. Rarely is any publicity given to it since the insurers would not want their clients to think that they might not be adequately diligent in the oversight of their own trillion dollar industry, and they especially don’t want us to know that we might be bearing the costs of fraud.

Thus the existence of fraud and abuse is actually an argument in favor of enacting and implementing single payer Medicare for All since our public stewards would be much more effective in ferreting it out than would be the private insurers who merely want to keep it out of our sight as they pay off the crooks. Suppressing public knowledge of fraud might be a cool business move on the part of the insurers. but it’s our money that they are giving away.

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