What paperwork adds to health care cost

Created by: Medical Transcription

Hat tip to The Dish for the link.

My thoughts on this:

Not all administrative costs are waste.  I don’t see any way to get rid of paying bills, disease management (whatever that is) or over-the-phone consultations.  But the profits of private insurance companies and their advertising contribute nothing to the well-being of patients.   That is why the administrative costs of Medicare are only 10 percent of budget, while the best of the private insurance companies take out 20 percent.   This is why it is plausible that a self-financing public option for health care could compete with private plans, in spite of having to take on sick and insolvent patients rejected by the private system.

My own physician uses electronic records keeping.  I don’t see any reason why all physicians don’t do this except inertia.

One good thing about President Obama is his understanding of the importance of technical efficiency, and the things that can be done to help the public without threatening anybody’s interests.   One example is the incentives in the Affordable Care Act to improve electronic record-keeping.  I can’t see why anybody would oppose this if they understand it.

Probably the most efficient medical record-keeping system in the world is the French system.  Everybody in France has a carte vitale—a little green card that looks like a credit card, with a memory chip containing the person’s complete medical history.  If a French person goes to the doctor, the doctor slips the card into a computer, reads the medical history and enters the new diagnosis and treatment, which is recorded on the card.  The card also contains billing information.  The patient is reimbursed for 70 percent of the cost of the treatment (more for the indigent and the chronically ill) without further ado.  No French physician or patient has to spend time or money fighting with insurance companies over reimbursement.

All this is described in T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care, which I strongly recommend.  Reid, a reporter for the Washington Post, describes the French, German, Japanese, British, Canadian and other health care systems and compares them with that of the United States.

His conclusion is that the United States already has its own version of almost every health insurance system in the world.  Our Medicare system copied Canadian Medicare, except that the Canadian system covers everyone.  Our Veterans Administration system is a government-administered system like the British National Health System.  Our employer-based health insurance is like the French, German and Japanese systems, except that their health insurance providers are non-profit.  Each country’s system has problems and flaws, but even so, all the other industrialized countries manage to insure all citizens and provide a higher level of medical care at less cost than in the United States.

Tags: Cost of medical paperwork, Electronic medical records, Medical paperwork