Follow the money: Patient health suffers from ill-advised, unnecessary treatments

Medicare spending on skin substitutes is not just a paperwork problem. Real patients who were Medicare beneficiaries suffered gravely due to treatments that didn’t work or that weren’t needed in the first place. Advocacy organization Accountable for Health has documented some of those examples, and CEO Mara McDermott, JD, discusses them here.

Medical Economics: Accountable for Health has compiled some stories about actual patients involved in these treatments. I don’t want to delve too much into human suffering, but there is a real human cost. Can you talk more about that?

Mara McDermott, JD: It is incredibly upsetting. I would...