PHOENIX — Attorney General Kris Mayes is accusing major health insurance companies of engaging in illegal price fixing she says profited the companies at the expense of patients and their doctors.
In a new lawsuit announced Monday, Mayes said the companies conspired with each other, at least indirectly, to decide how much they would reimburse doctors and hospitals for certain medical procedures. The attorney general said they did that by sharing information — she says illegally — about what level of payment medical providers were willing to accept.
Mayes said they did this by providing data about their own payment practices with a company known as MultiPlan. That company, she said, then created an algorithm that was fed back out to participating insurers, telling them how much — or how little — they needed to pay.
