Cancer docs made $275 million on bunk study

MSNBC.com describes a report that suggests that taypayers footed the bill for ‘unreliable’ research. Excerpts below.

Link: Cancer docs made $275 million on bunk study - Cancer - MSNBC.com

Cancer doctors received about $275 million from the federal government and the elderly last year as part of a yearlong research project that many doctors believe won’t produce any useful findings.

Under the program, the federal government paid $130 each time a chemotherapy provider assessed a Medicare patient’s pain, fatigue and nausea. The payments were designed to encourage doctors to report information that might one day lead to improved care for cancer patients.

In a report to be released Wednesday, the inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department cast doubt on whether the money was well spent. He questioned the integrity of the data that doctors submitted.

While the federal government will foot the bill for most of the unreliable data, senior citizens and disabled Americans on Medicare paid, too. That’s because they were charged $26 each time their doctors billed Medicare for submitting information about their side effects.

Doctors, meanwhile, made tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars off the program.

Medicare officials disputed that the program was wasteful. They said the program was an initial step in the Bush administration’s push to measure the quality of health care.

The project proved valuable in showing that it was indeed feasible to get doctors on a large-scale basis to report important quality measurements from their offices, Medicare officials said. In coming years, those measurements will be refined and improved, which could lead to potential breakthroughs in care.

About 90 percent of eligible health care providers participated in the program. The median amount paid to each physician was $23,000. But some doctors got a lot more.

The top 10 billers, whom the IG declined to identify, received more than $270,000 each. One oncologist in Florida billed the government for $625,803. Another in Kansas billed for $507,563.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services regularly carries out research, but the chemotherapy project is by far the biggest. It was estimated to cost $300 million, including the beneficiaries’ copays. The next largest project will cost $60 million over eight years.

A commission that advises Congress on Medicare issues noted in January that it visited oncologists in five states as part of a review of the program.