Recently released data about Medicare payments to doctors is missing large amounts of information, badly undercutting its usefulness for analyzing Medicare spending and making reforms to the government-funded system, the American Medical Association (AMA) charged Thursday. The AMA said that up to 40 percent of medical provider billing codes that should have been included in the huge data dump were missing "entirely," presenting a potentially skewed picture of Medicare spending in different areas of the country and misleading the general public. One example was the fact that the data dump identified zero Medicare claims for cases in 2012 of "closed treatment of shoulder dislocation, with manipulation; without anesthesia," according to the AMA.
