Another Insurer Settles With N.Y. Over Faulty Reimbursement Standards

From the Wall Street Journal

“Cigna has reached an agreement with New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo to pay $10 million to settle charges the insurer underpaid doctors by basing payments on flawed data from UnitedHealth's Ingenix database.”
“ Mr. Cuomo has also notified Excellus BlueCross BlueShield of his intent to sue over its manipulation of reimbursement rates for out-of-network services. Last month UnitedHealth agreed to pay $50 million to create an independent database to replace Ingenix. “

It turns out that Ingenix is owned by United Health. D’oh! Problem is, that many other insurers use Ingenix for their fee rates, so many patients are affected.

I’m not convinced we need these insurance companies. They have an overhead of 30% and still deny claims. Hey, we can extend Medicare to more people since it has only a 2% overhead, we can get all our claims denied much more cheaply!
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