Time magazine’s Scott Haig, M.D., says in a recent article that to fix healthcare we need to streamline regulation and billing, “computerize everything,” and find a better way of sanctioning bad practices without the threat of malpractice litigation.
On managed care, he writes: “It costs the typical doctor about 10%, right off the top, to collect our fees from the HMOs and other insurance companies we have to deal with. This is due to the ultra-complex set of rules and regulations those companies have established to ‘control costs’ (read: to pay us less while their executives take home more) and the billing staffs we have to hire to deal with them. This money does nothing for patients….It could easily be eliminated with simple, intelligent, centralized payment rules.”
I always wondered what was up with all those workers shuffling papers in my doctor’s office.
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