Wendell Potter: Insurance Industry Flack Screws Up, Points Us to Report We Really Should Read

Wendell Potter: Insurance Industry Flack Screws Up, Points Us to Report We Really Should Read:

A major point of the Thomson Reuters paper is that up to $700 billion that we spend on health care in the U.S. is wasted and that a big reason for that waste is our multi-payer system of private health insurance companies.

'Health care providers must deal with dozens of health benefit plans to bill successfully for services rendered,' the report said. 'Health plans must support systems for underwriting, claims administration, provider network contracting, and broker network management... Simplifying our health care system's administration could reduce annual health care costs by almost $300 billion.'

Then there were these bullet points that surely will never appear in a health insurance industry presentation:

• The average U.S. hospital spends one quarter of its budget on billing and administration, nearly twice the average in Canada. American physicians spend nearly eight hours per week on paperwork and employ 1.66 clerical workers per doctor, far more than Canada.

• In 1999, health administration costs totaled at least $294.3 billion in the United States, or $1,059 per capita, as compared with $307 per capita in Canada. After exclusions, administration accounted for 31 percent of health care expenditures in the United States and 16.7 percent of health care expenditures in Canada.

The white paper is here.

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