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Spending on low-value health care among fee-for-service Medicare recipients dropped only marginally from 2014 to 2018, despite both a national campaign to better educate clinicians and increasing use of payment revisions that discourage wasteful care, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Three items accounted for two-thirds of the low-value care. Among these, prescribing opioids for acute back pain increased despite a growing national awareness of the harms caused by the drugs and the role of such prescribing in fueling the nation s opioid crisis.
The study found that the proportion of study participants receiving any of 32 low-value services decreased from 36.3% in 2014 to 33.6% in 2018. Annual spending per 1,000 individuals on low-value care also decreased, from $52,766 to $46,922 from 2014 to 2018. The findings are published online by the journal