Perhaps by not bilking customers with needless procedures, costly and pointless hospital stays, and generally more direct and honest patient care.

You mean by reducing the amount and quality of care that hospitals provide? I never thought that getting extra care from a hospital would be spun as “bilking customers.” I guess my mom is about to get bilked out of a pleasant stay on a 6 month-long waiting list when she goes in to get a hip replacement next week.

But we can’t take all the credit because malpractice insurance is so ridiculous that doctor’s often throw everything at a patient so that all the bases are covered.

I think, ultimately, Obama is going to have to offer a federal malpractice cap. Even with a cap, doctors and hospitals will still have a lot of incentive to cover their asses — but it might cut down on some of the more needless/redundant tests that are ordered. At will certainly cut down on the cost of malpractice insurance.

In addition to the glass-half-empty approach of cutting care, there are a couple simple fixes. Hospitals (on average) are relatively obsolete in terms of technology, so by implementing (by choice) an HIS they’ll see some efficiencies. A good HIS will also help doctors avoid fatal/costly drug interactions. Simple things like migrating to chlorhexidine (versus other topical antiseptics) will reduce HAIs. Little known fact–an area rubbed with alcohol isn’t sterile until the alcohol dries, which takes about 2 minutes. The next time you get blood drawn see how long the lab worker waits between swabbing your arm and jamming a needle in you. Good times.

Make no mistake folks, hospitals know how much they give away in freebies to some folks, they can put a number on it to the penny. If everyone gets coverage, those numbers go down substantially.

If hospitals have a reasonable expectation that these costs will be reduced, then they can make this kind of an offer, and rationalize their pricing structures a bit.

Let’s see, cut the administrators…uhm, no. Cuts administrator support and billing, uhm no. I know, let’s get rid of nurses and maintenance.

Bank it

Hospitals are very stuck in arcane filing and billing methods. I believe the figure is less then 2% of hospitals have an automated system for tracking patients, and this very non-computerized system costs a lot in overhead. The problem is computerizing these are -very- complex and costly. The industry has competing standards, issues with medical information safety, difficulties with hospital culture, and a myriad of systems that do not necessarily talk together. Hospital admins have long wanted to streamline this, and the issue has been in from of them for 15-20+ years.

I think it’s possible with a push from the Federal government (there has been no push in previous administrations) the industry can come together and come up with standards and procedures to streamline. Very curious to see what happens -

There is an awful lot of waste in the health system. Take, for example, medical billing. Many US hospitals have floors of offices dedicated to dealing with billing. Most Doctors offices have a dedicated staff person who does billing. Google medical billing and you’ll see there area lot of jobs available in that field. They need all these specialists because American health insurance companies all use different paperwork, and all insist on thorough documentation of anything they pay for. Which means that all medical billing departments have to understand a) what most procedures are, b) the codes for those procedures (and each insurance company has a different coding system), c) how much each procedure costs per the contract between that particular hospital and that particular insurer…

In most countries that just doesn’t happen. The paperwork ain’t necessarily easy, but it’s the same regardless of insurance company. So large operations can get by with a handful of people,and smaller ones can just have the office manager take care of it.

I’m not saying Medical Billing specialists are bad people, or that they don’t deserve their jobs in the current system. I am saying that it’s very easy to imagine a system without them.

Add in an increase in preventive care and you can cut health care costs by quite a few points in theory. 1% of the health sector a year is $20 Billion, or $200 billion in ten years.