Andy Slavitt — President Obama’s choice to manage Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid — was linked seven years ago to a massive medical data fraud scheme that resulted in what was then the largest settlement ever by an insurance company.
If he is confirmed by the Senate, Slavitt will head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which manages the federal government’s three biggest health care programs. He will manage an estimated $1 trillion in benefits that are paid to millions of doctors, patients and hospitals.
Slavitt was CEO of Ingenix, a health data analytics firm at the center of a $50 million settlement in 2009 with then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and a $350 million settlement with the American Medical Association.
Cuomo and the AMA charged that Ingenix supplied databases to insurance companies that fraudulently calculated reimbursements for out-of-network medical services provided to policyholders, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.
Ingenix was owned by UnitedHealth Group, which did not admit to any criminal wrong-doing in the settlements.
The Ingenix scandal became public in February 2008 when Cuomo filed a “notice of intent to sue” Ingenix and UnitedHealth Group for “rigged” reimbursement rates that forced patients to overpay up to 30 percent for out-of-network doctors and hospitals.
Cuomo charged that Ingenix was running a “scheme” that sought “to defraud consumers by manipulating reimbursement rates.”
The AG told reporters, “This involves fraud in the hundreds of millions of dollars, affecting thousands and thousands of families. Too many people have been hurt. It has to stop.”
It was estimated that years of data manipulation by Ingenix affected as many as 110 million Americans — about one in three patients — who used doctors, labs or hospitals that were out of their insurance network.
Cuomo, who is now New York’s Democratic governor, estimated that patients who used out-of-network providers received between 10 to 28 percent less than they were entitled to because of Ingenix’s flawed data.
The $350 million was to reimburse doctors and patients shortchanged by Slavitt’s company. The $50 million went to establish a database of physician charges to be administered independently by a university. Ingenix also agreed to shutter its entire medical data analytics department.
