PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

12-May-2014

Contact: Katie DuBoff Katie_DuBoff@HMS.HARVARD.EDU 617-432-3038 Harvard Medical School

In the first large-scale study to directly measure wasteful spending in Medicare, researchers found that Medicare spent $1.9 billion in 2009 for patients to receive any of 26 tests and procedures that have been shown by empirical studies to offer little or no health benefit.

By analyzing Medicare claims data, researchers in the Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy found that at least one in four Medicare recipients received one or more of these services in 2009. What's more, those 26 services are just a small sample of the hundreds of services that are known to provide little or no medical value to patients in many circumstances.

"We suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg," said study author J. Michael McWilliams, associate professor of health care policy. The study appears today in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The researchers said that the methods utilized in the study will provide useful tools for measuring the effectiveness of reform efforts, like those in the Affordable Care Act, aimed at reducing wasteful spending in Medicare and across the health care system.

Pervasive waste

Health care spending in America is at an all-time high and continues to rise. Efforts to curb wasteful spending in Medicare and throughout the health care system are crucial to attempts to reduce spending while improving or at least preserving quality of care.

"We were surprised that these wasteful services were so prevalent," said Aaron Schwartz, an MD/PhD student in the HMS Department of Health Care Policy and lead author of the study. "Even just looking at a fraction of wasteful services and using our narrowest definitions of waste, we found that one quarter of Medicare beneficiaries undergo procedures or tests that don't tend to help them get better."

Read more:

$1.9 billion in Medicare waste: 'Tip of the iceberg'