A friend of mine has her own medical practice. She has two office staffers and I casually mentioned that they must be busy negotiating with insurance companies and Medicare. The doctor replied “They could never do that. The people who do that have degrees in medical billing. I pay a service to do all of my billing.” How much does that cost? “They take seven percent of whatever they can collect.”
Young people: http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/ has some information about how to get an Associates or Bachelors degree in this growing field.
A variant of this is the business model of the company I am currently coding for.
I refer to it as “Leeching off the incredibly dysfunctional American health care system.” I often wonder whether we’re actually doing anyone any good, or are merely engaging in a form of speculation not too different from what happens on wall street.
In his book, “The Dilbert Principle”, Scott Adams refers to company functions that are a degree removed from the actual purpose of the company.
For example, at Microsoft, the engineer developing the Windows OS has a direct hand in making money for the company. The ISO-9000 compliance officer however is a degree removed from this.
Companies like this medical billing company are the equivalent of the ISO-9000 compliance companies. They are merely pilot fish on the backs of government legislation. The more jobs that arise as a side-effect of legislation, vs producing actual services and goods, the worse off this country will be.
Charles: not speculation.
The better word is “extraction”.
Technically, the patient is the thing that generates a flow (i.e. money) between two different potentials.
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One’s narrow task is to direct as much of flow as possible to the desired recipient, be it hospital, health care facility, doctor, billing group, etc.
Patients who self pay and private insurers who are accountable to their owners are the only entities in the system who might care about reducing total amounts of flow/money.
Everyone else is insensitive to absolute levels, furthermore, the whole thing is not pareto-efficient, so pursuit of individual optimization strategies may (and almost certainly do) make the total costs increase.
I’m with Phil. Its a disaster
This makes me want to cry. I saw a PBS documentary on the Independent Lens that said 25% of every healthcare dollar is eaten up in this sort of administrative uselessness. Now there is a degree in it? Seriously? In other news, Obama decided he wants a pastry from my home town of Racine, Wi and it seems now I can’t fly today. I quit. I don’t know what I quit, but I quit something.
The seven percent figure is mind-boggling. Just to think of all the value that goes into running a medical clinic, starting with the physicians skill and training, and then that 7% of the revenue is skimmed off only for generating the bill. What a mess.
The job security here is that the American health care remains dysfunctional and complicated.
I don’t think that’s a given. The recent healthcare legislation does near nothing to control uncontrolled costs, and I think it likely the entire system as it is implodes on itself within some 5 yrs. That may or may not happen before everyone who actually needs healthcare is kicked out and needs to opt for the public option.
I don’t think “negotiating” with the government will be possible once they have that much of the market…
When we go to the doctor in France, there is no office staff at all, just the doctor. You pay him directly in cash when you leave, and he hands you a receipt. It’s about 25 Euros for us foreigners.