(401(K) 2012/flickr)

The doctors over at Physicians for a National Health Plan, advocates of a single-payer system, sure are prolific researchers, and here's the headline from their latest report: Private insurers have cost Medicare $282.6 billion in excess payments since 1985

From the group's news release:

Researchers say privately run Medicare Advantage plans have undermined traditional Medicare’s fiscal health and taken a heavy toll on taxpayers, seniors and the U.S. economy In the first study of its kind, a group of health policy experts has determined the amount of money that Medicare has overpaid private insurance companies under the Medicare Advantage program and its predecessors over the past 27 years and come up with a startling figure: $282.6 billion in excess payments, most of them over the past eight years. That’s wasted money that should have been spent on improving patient care, shoring up Medicare’s trust fund or reducing the federal deficit, the researchers say.

The findings appear in a paper by Drs. Ida Hellander, Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein titled “Medicare overpayments to private plans, 1985-2012” which they say is forthcoming in the International Journal of Health Services.

(Hellander is policy director at Physicians for a National Health Program, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. Woolhandler and Himmelstein are professors at the City University of New York School of Public Health, visiting professors at Harvard Medical School and co-founders of PNHP.)

The work is timely because national proposals, notably from vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (set to debate vice president Joe Biden tonight) rely on great expansions of private Medicare plans.

Here are more of the group's findings on private Medicare plans, known as Medicare Advantage plans: