STAT August 7, 2024
The nation’s largest health care company pressed thousands of its clinicians to use a thinly tested medical device to screen people for artery disease, dramatically boosting payments from the federal government for years even though many of the patients were not sick, a STAT investigation found.
The result was a torrent of sometimes questionable diagnoses of peripheral artery disease. Each one allowed the company, UnitedHealth Group, to claim thousands of dollars of extra payments tied to patients covered under Medicare Advantage, the increasingly popular version of Medicare run by private insurers. In many cases, those diagnoses were not medically useful, either because they were false positives or because they flagged early-stage disease, which...
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