Health insurance maze a major financial burden on hospitals ...

|?By?Mike Alberti?|?Health care,?Insurance, RemappingDebate.org

June 20, 2012 ? According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), nearly?$850 billion was funneled through private health insurance companies?in the United States in 2010, the most recent year for which detailed data is available, representing more than 5 percent of GDP. Most of that money went directly into health services, such as hospital care, physician reimbursement, and prescriptions drugs. The rest, some $102 billion, went into profits, marketing, and another broad category of expenses known as ?administrative costs.?

The United States spends significantly more than any other country on the administration of health care ? broadly defined as the amount of time, effort, and money that is spent coordinating the provision of services and payment between patients, providers, insurers, employers, and the government.

According to James G. Kahn, a professor at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California San Francisco, the billions of dollars spent by?insurance companies?on administrative costs (a portion of the $102 billion mentioned above) are only the tip of the iceberg. Doctors, hospitals, and employers are burdened with the additional costs of navigating the complex health insurance system, Kahn said, ?and those costs are then borne, indirectly, by patients.?

Researchers have estimated that, all together, the costs add up to hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a huge share of total health care spending. ?In all the discussion about the money spent on health care,? Kahn said, ?those costs have received a surprisingly small amount of attention.?

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Source: http://pnhpcalifornia.org/2012/07/health-insurance-maze-a-major-financial-burden-on-hospitals-doctors-businesses/

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