WSJ investigation finds Medicare Advantage insurers made false diagnoses

Private insurers involved in the Medicare Advantage program, such as UnitedHealth (UNH) and Humana (HUM), made hundreds of thousands of questionable diagnoses in order to trigger taxpayer-funded payments between 2018 and 2021, including making outright incorrect diagnoses, Christopher Weaver, Tom McGinty, Anna Wilde Mathews and Mark Maremont of The Wall Street Journal reports, citing an analysis of billions of Medicare records performed by the Journal. These diagnoses included some potentially deadly illnesses, such as AIDS, for which patients received no subsequent care, and conditions people couldn’t possibly have, such as a non-diabetic patient being diagnosed with diabetic cataracts, the analysis showed.