Minor Axis
Well-Known Member
The Title of this thread is made in jest. Not an attack on Canada or Canadian medicine.
U.S. Doctors face Insurance Maze. So is this a big government issue, a capitalist issue, or a big Medicine issue? Who wants to spin this first??
U.S. Doctors face Insurance Maze. So is this a big government issue, a capitalist issue, or a big Medicine issue? Who wants to spin this first??
Physicians in Canada, where health care is administered mainly by the government, did spend a good deal of time and money communicating with their payers. But American doctors in the study spent far more dealing with multiple health plans: more than $80,000 per year per physician, or roughly four times as much as their northern counterparts. And their offices spent as many as 21 hours per week with payers, nearly 10 times as much as the Canadian offices.
The complicated task inevitably gets in the way of patient care.
A young patient complaining of extreme fatigue, for example, might benefit from a $40 blood test that could confirm infectious mononucleosis in 10 minutes. But a doctor cannot order the simple test without first checking with the insurance company to see if it is covered and if there are any constraints on where the patient’s blood can be drawn and the test run.