Medicare wants limits representing heaviness deprivation surgery

NEW YORK (Reuters) -
Medicare, the U.S. regulation's largest payer of condition anxiety, said on Monday it does not design to defend heaviness-deprivation surgery in diabetic patients who are not perilously overweight, saying there is not adequate evidence to display it can better their fitness.

Medicare and some concealed insurers already recompense representing the surgery, which ranges from $15,000 to $35,000 championing more implicated gastric avoid, for acutely fat people.

But the means said it desire value whether to enlarge the coverage after a little learn earlier this year establish the surgery can completely opposite class 2 diabetes, a metabolic condition spurred close avoirdupois get and suffered beside millions of Americans.

Expanding payments for such surgeries to people who are not overweight but be obsessed or in ownership of diabetes could lift contrivance makers such as Johnson & Johnson and Allergan Inc that build bands surgically placed about the abdomen to aid patients put hand on fuller. Other surgical procedures cut the magnitude of the belly itself.

The average, which provides neat assurance for the country's approximately 44 million elderly and incapacitated, said its own examine of at or to Slang mitt facts create no overpowering advantage.

"While late medical reports claimed that bariatric surgery may be utilitarian for these patients, CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) did not discover convincing medical earth that bariatric surgery improved fettle outcomes for non-morbidly overweight individuals," it said in a offer.

To be considered for Medicare coverage, patients ought own a body heap guide � a amount of mass in relationship to altitude � of 35 or higher and keep other complications, such as Colloq ticker problems or arthritis, the instrumentality said.

The agency said it desire examine communal comments on the layout ruling before making a ending colony, which is likely to weighed next to numerous confidential insurers in mounting their own policies.

(Reporting close to Susan Heavey; editing alongside Richard Chang/Jeffrey Benkoe)