Months before travel bans and lockdowns, Americans were transmitting the virus across the country The Wall Street Journal interviewed disease detectives and reviewed hundreds of pages of new research to piece together how the coronavirus infiltrated the wealthiest nation on earth. The latest genetic, epidemiological and computational research suggests it was spreading inside the country before anyone started looking. How did it happen? Find out here.
Sparse testing is just one reason the official tally is far too low, but the numbers will get more reliable over time. Read the full story here.
The top 1% of billers of the federal program in 2013 reaped 17.5% of all payments to individual providers that year. That same cluster of doctors and other individual providers received 16.6% of the program’s payments in 2012. Read the full story here.
Powerful painkiller hydrocodone acetaminophen was the most widely prescribed drug under Medicare Part D in 2013, often by primary-care doctors. Read the full story here.
Drugs for diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis account for more than a quarter of spending on prescriptions for America’s elderly and disabled, data show. Read the full story here.
More than 2,300 providers earned $500,000 or more from Medicare in 2012 from a single procedure or service, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Read the full story here.
Some doctors who received large sums from Medicare in 2012 have had run-ins with the law, signaling how the government’s unprecedented move to make such payments public could throw up red flags for potential abuse. Read the full story here.
The release of government data showing wide variation in hospital pricing removes a layer of secrecy but probably won’t make medical charges more uniform, experts said Wednesday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released data revealing significant variations in hospital pricing for common treatments from 3,337 hospitals. The disclosed prices often don’t reflect the actual amounts paid, with numerous entities like Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers negotiating different rates. Despite the data’s transparency, experts believe it might not standardize medical charges, and its usefulness for consumers determining out-of-pocket costs is limited....