A new study has revealed that Medicare paid $1.9 billion for tests and procedures that patients did not need in 2009.
J. Michael McWilliams, author of the study and associate professor of health care policy from Harvard Medical School, looked at the data of 1.3 million Medicare claims for the year. He and his colleagues found that 26 procedures performed in various health care services were not beneficial to the patients. About 42 percent of the patients underwent procedures that had minimal benefits.
"We suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg," said Prof. McWilliams in a news release.
The researchers concluded that 25 percent of the procedures and tests were unnecessary for the patients' condition and did not do anything to make them better. Some of these services include knee surgery, back surgery, cervical cancer screening for older women, computed tomography scanning of the sinuses, stress tests, and prostate tests for older men.
"We were surprised that these wasteful services were so prevalent," Aaron Schwartz, lead author of the study, said in a news release. "Even just looking at a fraction of wasteful services and using our narrowest definitions of waste, we found that one quarter of Medicare beneficiaries undergo procedures or tests that don't tend to help them get better."
Further details of the study can be read on the May 12 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.
Medicare has addressed the issue of "wasteful" or unnecessary tests and procedures to reduce costs and improve the quality of care given to the patients. According to the Washington Post, Massachusetts is currently experimenting with global payments while the Medicare & Medicaid Innovation has been testing bundled payments across the United States.
Reuters cited possible reasons for this problem: doctors might have considered the tests and procedures as standard care, or they wanted to make sure they did not miss any details to avoid medical lawsuits.
