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Where Medicare Dollars Go

Last update on: Feb 02 2017

As the Center for Medicare and Medicaid has become more open with data, we’ve learned more about government medical spending. A few years ago we learned that treatments for what appear to be the same conditions vary greatly around the country, as do the costs and the results. This week we learned that a small number of doctors account for a hefty percentage of Medicare spending. You can read the details here and in the embedded links. Of course, we need to learn more before jumping to conclusions. The data at this point only indicate areas where questions have to be answered and more data obtained.

Medicare paid almost 4,000 doctors and medical providers more than $1 million apiece in 2012, including seven who received more than $10 million. Eye doctors were among the highest compensated, including one Florida ophthalmologist who received $21 million.

The listing, gleaned from 880,000 providers paid by Medicare, was released this morning. The data, the first look at physician payments by the agency in more than 30 years, showed that most spending fell to a small group of doctors, with less than 3 percent taking in about 28 percent of the $64 billion paid out to individual providers.

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