Ryann Grochowski Jones was the data editor at ProPublica. Previously, she was a data reporter at ProPublica and at Investigative Newsource/KPBS in San Diego, California. She received her master’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where she was a data librarian for Investigative Reporters and Editors/National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. Ryann started her career as a municipal beat reporter for her hometown newspaper in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
A ProPublica analysis found that many health insurance plans offered in the federal Affordable Care Act marketplace are changing their benefits heading into 2015. Consumers have until Dec. 15 to switch plans before they are automatically re-enrolled.
Payments from pharmaceutical companies touch hundreds of thousands of doctors. The 17 companies we've tracked spent $1.4 billion in 2013 alone. Here are our top five takeaways from following all that money.
Using recently released Medicare data, we examined how doctors and other health professionals billed for office visits, one of the most common services patients receive. We found some doctors who billed for the most costly, most complex visits almost exclusively and charged top rates far more than their peers.
Medicare recently released, for the first time, details on 2012 payments to individual doctors and other health professionals serving the 46 million seniors and disabled in its Part B program. Part B covers services as varied as office visits, ambulance mileage, lab tests, and the doctor’s fee for open-heart surgery. Use this tool to find and compare providers.
Medicare paid for more than 200 million office visits for established patients in 2012. Overall, health professionals classified only 4 percent as complex enough to command the most expensive rates. But 1,800 providers billed at the top level at least 90 percent of the time, a ProPublica analysis found. Experts question whether the charges are legitimate.
Research has been seen as less objectionable than other forms of interactions with drug companies, but 10 percent of researchers have multiple ties among the nine companies ProPublica analyzed. That raises questions about doctors’ impartiality.
As transparency increases and blockbuster drugs lose patent protection, drug companies have dramatically scaled back payments to doctors for promotional talks. This fall, all drug and medical device companies will be required to report payments to doctors.
ProPublica obtained Medicare Part D data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under the Freedom of Information Act. Here follows more information about the data and how we analyzed it.
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