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Medicare liens have acquired something of a "super lien" status

• This allows them to compel parties to notify Medicare if a Medicare beneficiary is involved in litigation and must be included in settlement negotiations in a way that protects Medicare's interest.
• The effect of this expanded set of lien rights appears in the data in that Medicare liens are, on average, more frequent and recover less money than private liens.
• This may seem counterintuitive but is consistent with Medicare recovering on liens that other parties would not find as lucrative to pursue.

Medicaid liens, while similar in frequency, recover less than Medicare liens

• This may be because, during the sample period, the Ahlborn and Wos cases had restricted Medicaid's lien rights relative to Medicare, something Congress reversed in 2013, and after 2017 Medicaid will have similar opportunities to assert greater lien rights as has Medicare.

The current frequency of liens in mass compensation events suggests a potential problem with the push to expand lien rights in non-Medicare statutory liens

• As lien rights grow, liens will almost certainly become more frequent and command a greater share of recovery funds.
• This suggests that the risk of plaintiffs' being unwilling to pursue claims is real, even if the data surveyed here do not necessarily suggest that liens are at some sort of tipping point.