Here’s a spreadsheet that provides very detailed counts and percentages of suppressed records across Medicare claim types. It’s fairly consistent with what I posted previously, but with more detail. For instance about 4-5% of inpatient claims are suppressed, in general.
Here’s another that provides the same for Medicaid (MAX) files. As I suspected, the damage is greater than for Medicare. Up to 8% of inpatient claims are suppressed. I don’t know why the suppression proportion drops so much in 2011, but so do record counts. I’m guessing the analysis is based on incomplete files.
Remember, all the suppressed records are for claims related to substance use disorder treatment and diagnoses. So, this is far from a random sample. (It wouldn’t be that harmful if it were random.)
The spreadsheets come by way of ResDAC. Also, they use the term “suppression” in them and in the file names. I have mostly avoided that term, but I’m going to stop doing so. If this is what we’re calling it, then let’s all use the same terminology.
This tag pulls up all our posts on this issue. It’s the one you should share with colleagues to bring them fully up to speed.
