HOUSTON — Houston Methodist has joined a stampede of plaintiffs suing nearly every major health insurance company in America for orchestrating an alleged price-fixing cartel to siphon billions of dollars from care providers and their patients.
The massive legal action involves hundreds of plaintiffs, as well as a roster of blue-chip companies, and threatens to upend a lucrative corner of the health sector that determines how out-of-network care is priced and reimbursed for patients with private insurance. Methodist is among the most influential plaintiffs to join the legal action, which has consolidated dozens of lawsuits filed over the past 18 months in courthouses from New York to San Francisco and now sits before a single federal judge in Chicago.
The stakes could hardly be higher for the health insurance industry. The nation’s largest health insurance companies — including five that are among the 25 largest public companies ranked by revenue — stand accused of conspiring with a third-party software and analytics firm to suppress reimbursement rates for hundreds of millions of patient procedures…