[rflrob]

"Just processing the insurance forms costs $58 for every patient encounter, according to Dr. Stephen Schimpff, an internist and former CEO of University of Maryland Medical Center who is writing a book about the crisis in primary care."

I'm curious how the arithmetic on that works out. The median pay for medical assistants is $14.12/hour [1], which means that assuming the assistant is handling the insurance form, that works out to just over 4 hours per patient encounter. There might be some fixed costs (filing space, for instance, is not free), and some costs associated with communicating with the insurance company, but it's really not obvious to me how any of those can add up to $58/visit.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/medical-assistants.htm

[dunmalg]

Cost of employing someone is more than just their hourly rate * hours worked. For example, at one job where I was paid $26/hr, my time was billed at $48/hr--- and this was for a government agency internally billing itself, so there was no profit margin involved, just the cumulative cost of wages, benefits, and associated overhead.