More than two weeks after the cyberattack, financially strapped doctors, hospitals and health care providers said on Friday that it would take weeks for a full recovery of digital networks into which hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance payments are poured every day. He harshly criticized the health group's latest estimates.
UnitedHealth tests increased bill payments and establishes steady flow of payments since Change Healthcare, the nation's largest billing and payment clearinghouse, was effectively shut down by hackers on February 21 He said it would take at least two weeks.
But desperate health care providers, who have borrowed money to cover expenses and employee salaries, expressed skepticism about the estimate, saying it could take months before billing and payment backlogs are cleared. I am worried that it will cost me too much.
“There's almost a three-week difference in cash flow,” said Brad Larsen, a psychologist and founder of Portland Mental Health & Wellness in Oregon, adding that the group's expected payout was nearly three weeks away. He added that he only received 10%. He said the clinic had to borrow $300,000 to pay the first of two payrolls that month. “That's not good.”
In an apparent move to appease some providers who expressed disappointment with United's previous relief for the loan program, which offered one-time payments of just $20 per week, the parent company agreed to issue the advance payment. . United Airlines announced that the nation's largest insurance company will begin accelerating payments to hospitals and doctors based on pre-cyberattack billings.
And given that Change manages one in three U.S. patient records, representing 15 billion transactions a year, the cyberattack could not only affect United Airlines customers, but many other insurance companies as well. customers were also affected. For this reason, UnitedHealth executives recommended offering upfront payments as well. “To me, that's the quickest way to get money into the hands of providers,” Dirk McMahon, president and chief operating officer of United Airlines, said in an interview. .
The severity of the cyberattack, which has crippled billing and payments for everything from the simplest drugstore prescriptions to the most expensive surgeries, has rattled industry and governments. Some have expressed concern that the worst may not be over yet, fearing that patient data has been compromised in a ransomware attack.
UnitedHealth Group declined to comment on whether any of its insureds' information was hacked, whether it was financial or medical information or through insurance enrollment at pharmacies, hospitals or clinics. The company's only response was that it was continuing to work with law enforcement to investigate the attack. The FBI and U.S. cybersecurity experts are investigating.
According to a news article in Wired, on March 1st, a Bitcoin address associated with a group of suspected hackers known as AlphV or BlackCat received $22 million in transactions, and some security firms believe that United Airlines is likely the group's He said that the ransom was paid to . United Airlines declined to comment, as did Record Future, the security firm that first discovered the payments.
“United Airlines has not disclosed what information was exposed to the hackers,” said Ed Tilley, a licensed clinical social worker in Charlotte, North Carolina. Among the information he typically submits to the Change network for billing is a patient's date of birth and diagnosis. . “I feel obligated to tell patients if their identities are made public,” he says.
UnitedHealth Group stock has fallen 7.7% since the cyberattack became public.
UnitedHealth Group said payments will begin to be available around March 15 and will begin testing and establishing connections for hospitals and doctors to submit claims the week of March 18, though McMahon acknowledged that this timing is subject to change. “We are in a very fluid environment,” he said.
“We're in a mad rush to get these systems up and running,” McMahon said.
Most of the gaps in pharmacy deals appear to have been resolved, but hospitals and doctors should continue to find workarounds, he suggested. But for some providers, that means moving to Change's competitors, which are now inundated with new claims and struggling to manage increased workloads.
“I submitted some claims to the new system, and it took a few hours. Then I was like, 'Where is it? “Not available,” said Angela Belleville, a mental health counselor in Salem, Massachusetts. “I tried again yesterday and the system completely froze.”
Other major insurers have been largely silent on whether they will issue upfront payments, as Mr. McMahon has suggested, or offer other relief.
“Crickets are the culprit,” said Chip Kahn, president of the American Hospital Federation, which represents for-profit hospitals. Once previously submitted claims start to dry up, “you're in the danger zone,” he says.
Small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, aren't sitting on piles of cash to get by while waiting for new redemptions.
“It's been two weeks now and people are starting to get worried,” said Maggie Williams, co-owner of Flourish Business Solutions, which provides billing advice to healthcare providers.
She said she has been receiving calls from doctors worried that they may not be able to make payroll or ultimately have to stop providing services to patients in the coming weeks. . “In many cases, they don't have enough savings to maintain their services and salaries,” she says.
“Nothing in this announcement materially changes the chronic cash flow impacts and uncertainty that our nation's hospitals and physicians are experiencing as a result,” the American Hospital Association, an industry group, said in a statement. ” he said. The group also said it will be “weeks, if not months, before our hospitals and other health care providers are fully operational.”
Powerful hospital lobbying groups are calling on federal officials to ease those pressures by accelerating Medicare reimbursement for health care providers, similar to efforts made to get hospitals and doctors back on their feet during the pandemic. It is one of the organizations that
This week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a series of measures, including expediting Medicare payments to health care providers. The department urges private insurers to do the same and asks private Medicare plans to relax or waive much-criticized prior authorization rules that make it more difficult to pay providers. Ta.
UnitedHealthcare also announced that it will ease prior authorization requirements for Medicare Advantage insurance until the end of March.
In addition to news of damage caused by cyberattacks, the partial closure of Change Healthcare has brought renewed attention to the merger of medical companies, physician groups, and other organizations into UnitedHealth Group. United's acquisition of Change in a $13 billion deal in 2022 was initially challenged by federal prosecutors, but the deal was cleared after the government lost the case.
On Friday, healthcare providers who sought advice or assistance from Change Healthcare customer support representatives instead received a recorded message that read: Please try the call again later. Thank you for calling. “Then the phone was hung up.
