The UnitedHealth Arterial Disease Screening Program increased profits

TThe nation’s largest health care company pressured thousands of doctors to use a barely tested medical device to screen people for artery disease, dramatically increasing federal government payments for years even though many of the patients were not sick. a STAT study showed.

The result was a flood of sometimes questionable diagnoses of peripheral artery disease. Each allowed the company, UnitedHealth Group, to claim thousands of dollars in additional payments for patients covered by Medicare Advantage, the increasingly popular version of Medicare administered by private insurers. In many cases, these diagnoses were not medically useful, either because they were false-positive results or because they identified early-stage disease, which is not the case.‘According to nine doctors, this is usually not treated.

UnitedHealth was perfectly positioned to invent and benefit from a national screening program. Over the past two decades, it has amassed an unprecedented collection of doctors – some 90,000 doctors in all – and used this empire to boost its bottom lines, as STAT previously reported. At the same time, it has solidified its leading position as the largest Medicare Advantage insurer. The full story of the company’s comprehensive vascular disease screening program, detailed here for the first time, reveals how UnitedHealth has used its growing dominance in the health care system to its own advantage – and at the expense of physicians, patients and taxpayers.