Medicare paid $17 million in 2012 to 28 physicians who have been charged with defrauding the program during the last 16 months, according to an analysis by The Hill.
The analysis found more than $10 million of that amount went to Detroit-area oncologist Farid Fata, MD, who has been accused of submitting false claims and administering unnecessary cancer treatments. He is currently in jail, according to the report.
Nearly $13.3 million went to physicians who were charged with fraud and practiced in Michigan. The Justice Department has charged 24 physicians in the state with fraud since January 2013, according to the report.
The Hill based its analysis on Medicare physician payment data CMS publicized yesterday. The newly released data set includes information on more than 880,000 healthcare professionals across the country who received a total of $77 billion in Medicare Part B fee-for-service payments in 2012. With the data, it's possible to compare 6,000 different types of services, procedures and payments received by individual providers, according to HHS.
CMS' landmark release of physician payment data builds on the agency's decision earlier this year to evaluate Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests from the media on a case-by-case basis for individual Medicare payments made to physicians, effective this past March. Previously, HHS said that "considering the two competing interests of public transparency and privacy," Medicare physician data could not be provided through FOIA requests. The decision to disclose the data was spurred by a federal judge's decision last year to lift a 1979 injunction that barred the release of individual physicians' annual Medicare payments. That court decision stems from a January 2011 request from Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
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