Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's going to the administration overhead. If you have to document everything and argue for every medical procedure and deal with 20+ different processes for filing claims then it takes time. And, as a provider, you have to pay someone to spend that time if you want to get paid. It doesn't help that our healthcare billing systems are so outdated and broken. I once had a doctor visit denied with the reason code that i…
No it's not. There is absolutely no way to get from $360B of insurer admin and net cost of insurance to $2.5T --- two point five trillion --- in practitioner costs on paperwork overhead. That is not a plausible argument. The numbers here are not close. They're stark.
> A new study finds that the extra time and labor physician practices spend on interacting with insurance companies and government entities cost U.S. physicians $82,975 each per year, while doctors in Ontario spent $22,205.
> Canadian physicians follow a single set of rules, but U.S. doctors grapple with different sets of regulations, procedures, requirements, formularies and forms mandated by each health insurance plan or payer. The average U.S. doctor spent 3.4 hours per week interacting with health plans; Ontario doctors spent 2.2 hours. The bureaucratic burden falls heavily on U.S. nurses and medical practice staff, who spent 20.6 hours per physician per week on administrative duties; their Canadian counterparts spent only 2.5 hours on paperwork.
All that falls in your $2.5T bucket. And their cleaners, HR, etc. And insurers have had 15 years of innovation since that study.