Dive Brief:
- Last week, CMS publicly released data on what it paid physicians in 2012—$77 billion to more than 880,000 health care providers.
- Lawyers representing health care fraud whistleblowers have immediately jumped on the Medicare data, in the hopes that it will bolster their cases.
- According to Reuters, settlements resulting from whistleblower cases can be very large. Typically, whistleblowers receive up to 30% of the government's recovered funds, and lawyers receive about 40% of the whistleblowers' payout.
Dive Insight:
While this is far from the first time the federal government has released statistics related to Medicare, this is the first time in decades that the federal government has released such detailed Medicare financial data. Not only lawyers, but researchers of all kinds have already plunged hip deep into this data to see what it can teach them. The data was released raw and mostly unformatted, and given its scope, it may be a long time before professionals are able to draw any defensible conclusions.