That is half 8 of Well being Care’s Colossus, a sequence about how UnitedHealth Group wields its unequalled doctor empire to spice up its income and increase its affect.
In each means, a examine printed this January in a serious medical journal was a win for UnitedHealth Group. It confirmed that UnitedHealth’s most popular strategy to protecting Medicare sufferers, an particularly worthwhile line of enterprise, was producing higher-quality look after older People than the usual methodology.
However a better inspection reveals causes to mistrust the narrative. The examine was funded by UnitedHealth’s Optum subsidiary, co-authored by a high worker, and primarily based partly on tightly managed knowledge from its personal doctor clinics. Its key discovering appears to be a statistical mirage, attributable to flaws in its methodology, in line with 13 impartial consultants who reviewed the manuscript for STAT.
“It’s not a sound comparability. It’s simply two units of information. The teams are so completely different,” stated Gerard Anderson, a well being coverage professor and Medicare professional at Johns Hopkins College. He famous variations in sufferers’ places, revenue ranges, and use of well being care companies seem to have skewed the outcomes.
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