Dive Brief:
- CMS recently disclosed which hospitals were the recipients of about $1.5 billion in 2015 when the agency resolved a backlog of Medicare billing disputes, Kaiser Health News reported.
- The list includes more than a third of U.S. hospitals.
- New York-Presbyterian was the top paid hospital at $15.8 million.
Dive Insight:
Overall, the document shows how much 2,022 received to settle 346,000 Medicare claims for patients dated on or before Oct. 1, 2013, Kaiser Health News reported.
The pay-out was the result of a deal the agency offered in August 2014 to pay 68% of the value of inpatient claims that were languishing in the hearings and appeals process, Healthcare Dive previously reported.
While the median payment was $307,642, 35 hospitals received a cool $5 million.
The payout at the time was hotly contested. Back then, the pay out suggested hospitals were ok with eating the costs, receiving a fraction of the claims and moving on with their lives. There was also some question into how accurate the process for recovery audit contractors (RACs) -- who get paid based on a successful audit -- actually was as it is in their financial interest to find mistakes and file audits.
About $9.6 billion had been collected by RACs between 2010 and September 2015, KHN noted.