Ingenix Lawsuit

There is a perverse pleasure seeing health-care leadership get some of their own. Ingenix is a subsidiary of United Health Group and is a prime resource for health plans and administrators in a score of lines of work related to health. One of the things they do is determine pricing by collecting fee schedule data... you know, that troubling little piece that the consumer-driven health care people want to be able to provide directly to consumers. Who better to collect fee schedules than a subsidiary of an insurance company, eh?

So a patient decided to sue them (reg required), citing low reimbursement to his provider as a result of a manipulated database leaving him on the hook for the balance of what he was charged. Here is another brief article on the matter.

We could have a field day blaming people, but I am still having a belly laugh over the AG's response:

Cuomo announced in February that he intended to sue Ingenix and said he was investigating what he called an “industrywide scheme perpetrated by some of the nation’s largest health insurance companies to defraud consumers.” So far his office has not filed a complaint.

Providers versus industry versus consumers! Take your pick!