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What is costs you to work with your insurance plan.
Health Affairs has published two studies that quantify the cost and time spent by physicians annually to interact with insurance plans. The studies are timely given that policy makers are in the midst of evaluating ways to cut healthcare costs as part of national healthcare reform. The national study finds that physicians spend, on average, the equivalent of three work weeks, annually, to perform administrative tasks required by health plans. The cost is $31 billion annually and represents 6.9% of all national expenditures for physicians and clinical services. Access the paper online here.
A second study published on the Health Affairs web site takes an in-depth look at the billing and insurance-related activities performed at a large multi-site, multi-specialty group practice in California. The study found that the clinicians spent more than 35 minutes per day performing billing and insurance-related work. This administrative work also required the equivalent of 0.67 non-clinical full-time staff per full-time physician at an annual cost of $85,276 per physician, amounted to 10 percent of operating revenue. This study can be accessed here.
Whopping Cough: A serious Issue
While most parents can't wait to hear their baby's first babbles and coos, there's a first sound that actress, singer and mother Jennifer Lopez is betting no parents ever want to hear - the sound of their baby with pertussis, more commonly known as whooping cough. Ms. Lopez has joined the March of Dimes and sanofi pasteur, the vaccines division of the sanofi-aventis Group, to create a national public awareness campaign called "Sounds of Pertussis."
Learn more about Pertussis:
Between 2000-2003 and 2004-2007, there was a 100 percent increase in reported cases of pertussis. Estimates indicate that there may be as many as 800,000 to 3.3 million total adult and adolescent cases of pertussis in any given year. Pertussis is highly contagious and is caused by bacteria which are spread through airborne droplets from the nose and throat.
So a cough, sneeze or even talking very close could lead to exposure. In adults, symptoms are usually milder than those found in infants, and pertussis is often mistaken for the common cold or bronchitis. In infants and some adults, pertussis causes severe coughing characterized by the unforgettable "whoop" sound made when gasping for breath after a coughing fit ...
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