A California state report suggests 36 of the state's payers provided regulators with inaccurate often overlapping physician lists, Kaiser Health News reports.
Here's what you should know.
1. Director of the California Department of Managed Health Care Shelley Rouillard said payers — including Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna and Hopkins, Minn.-based UnitedHealthcare — could face fines over the inaccurate data.
2. Ms. Rouillard said the propensity of errors prevented regulators from figuring out which patients have timely access to care.
3. UnitedHealth's online director listed 9,135 primary-care providers on a list during the year. These providers were absent by year's end, which KHN said is a 45 percent discrepancy .
4. Aetna counted cardiologists in a single county more than 160 times, inflating the number of specialists by 2,293, or 82 percent.
5. In an interview with California Healthline, Ms. Rouillard said, "I told the CEOs it looks to me like nobody cared. We will be holding their feet to the fire on this. I am frustrated with the health plans because the data we got was unacceptable. It was a mess."
6. Four payers provided plans without substantial errors.