Physicians for a National Health Program

CUNY researchers say new health law’s ‘contortions to appease private insurers’ have resulted in costly complexity, with enrollment price tag alone exceeding Medicare’s by nearly 700 percent

Minority physicians also play a large role in the care of patients with poorer health, according to a new study in JAMA Internal Medicine

October 15, 2012 -- In the first study of its kind, a group of health policy experts has determined the amount of money that Medicare has overpaid private insurance companies under the Medicare Advantage program and its predecessors over the past 27 years and come up with a startling figure: $282.6 billion in excess payments, most of them over the past eight years. That’s wasted money that should have been spent on improving patient care, shoring up Medicare’s trust fund or reducing the federal deficit, the researchers say.