Just days after cutting a $50 million deal with the state of New York to address similar issues, UnitedHealth Group has agreed to pay $350 million to settle a class-action suit brought against it by the American Medical Association alleging that its health plans unfairly used inaccurate pricing data to justify low out-of-network payments.
Earlier this week, the state of New York announced that UnitedHealth had agreed to pay $50 million to settle charges that physician charge data maintained by its Ingenix subsidiary was artificially low. The money will be used to create an independent non-profit that will administer a new charge database. Ingenix will use the non-profit's data and scrap its existing database.
Now, UnitedHealth has agreed to pay $350 million to settle the AMA's class-action suit, which argued that UnitedHealth's rate-setting practices violated several federal laws, including ERISA, RICO and antitrust law.
To get more background on the suit:
- read this Modern Healthcare piece (reg. req.)
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