Insurers’ red tape costs MDs

3 weeks of work, add $31 billion

 

With the single-payer or "Medicare for all" health care proposals being largely ignored, Congress and President Obama are thereby bypassing the chance to trim $31 billion in needless costs and provide US doctors an additional three weeks a year to spend on patient care.

 

An important new study, published May 14 on the Health Affairs Web site by Lawrence P. Casalino of Weill Cornell Medical College and his colleagues, shows that US physician practices report that overall the costs of interacting with insurance plans is $31 billion annually. This amounts to  6.9 percent of all U.S. expenditures for physician and clinical services.

 

Another study, published on the same day (May 14) on the Health Affairs site, offers a detailed examination of billing and insurance-related activities performed at a large multisite, multispecialty group practice in California. In order  to get payment for clinical services,  the clinicians devoted  more than 35 minutes per day performing billing and insurance-related work. These tasks also demanded the equivalent of 0.67 non-clinical full-time staff per full-time physician, resulting in an annual cost of $85,276 per physician, representing 10 percent of operating revenue.

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