Infected by greed and waste

Infected by greed and waste

Elizabeth Schulte looks at what could be done to fix the health care system--but isn't.

December 3, 2009

Most Americans live an illness or injury away from life-changing hardship. Medical bills contributed to more than 60 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007, according to a report in the August 2009 American Journal of Medicine. More than three-quarters of these people had insurance.

For 45-year-old Christine Phillips in Nashville, an emergency room visit after a car accident, in addition to two other expensive operations, doomed her. When she filed for bankruptcy, she listed about $7,000 in unpaid medical bills among her $187,000 in liabilities.

"The medical bills put me over the edge," Phillips, who lost her health insurance along with her job when she was fired because she had missed so much work while recuperating, told the New York Times. "I had no money for food at this point. How was I going to do it?"

The $7,000 in medical bills was a disaster for Phillips--but a drop in the bucket for Ron Williams, the CEO of Aetna--who took home over $24 million in total compensation in 2008, not including his personal use of a company aircraft and vehicle. Williams' pay in 2008 could pay Christine Phillips' overdue medical bills 3,400 times over.

If members of Congress really wanted to find the money for an adequate health care system, they could increase taxes on parasites like Williams--and cap CEO salaries.

But there's a lot more waste that could be done away with. According to Physicians for a National Health Program, more than 31 percent of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs like "paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc."

The process of doctors and other health care workers having to deal with numerous insurance plans at once adds plenty to cost of health care. According to a national survey of physicians by Lawrence Casalino and others, physicians spend an average of nearly three weeks a year on health insurance-related activities, such as authorization, pharmaceutical formularies, claims and billing, credentialing, contracting, and collecting and reporting quality data. Nursing staff spends more than 23 weeks per physician per year interacting with health plans, and clerical staff accrued 44 weeks.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/12/03/infected-by-greed-and-waste