What’s It Cost?
November 12, 2022
It all begins with an idea.
My Idea today is that CEO needs to have a special meaning when applied to hospital administrators. I will declare it now to mean =Costing Everyone Outrageously. I am not alone in this thought.
I found an article in my email box from healthcare dive.com that was published October 11, 2022. The article was titled “Wasteful administrative costs tied to high US health spending”. It cited a study done by a group called Health Affairs’ Council on Health Care Spending and Value, which said “ at least half of all administrative spending does not contribute to health outcomes in any discernible way”.
For those who do not know, administrative spending is money spent on salaries and benefits and bonuses for people who have a title that starts with a C - CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, CMO, CNO, CCO CLO, and more that seem to spring up monthly in the health industry. It makes me sad to call health an industry, but when corporatization of medicine is the name of the game then, health is part of the product. The other part of spending that most patients do not see and which most physicians do not manage, goes for billing and insurance functions, claims management, clinical documentation and coding, prior authorization, quality assurance and credentialing. The article says ineffective administrative spending cost us 285 to 570 billion dollars in 2019.
What solutions exist? One idea is that the C suite people need to be working clinicians at least 2 days of the week and then administrators 3 days a week. Then perhaps they might see the results of their decisions and have to live and function under the rules they make.
Another idea is to disconnect government from being the cash cow that it is now where it pays for services it cannot adequately monitor or control but for which it hands out gobs of cash routinely. The government makes a lot of rules to prevent fraud, but that just seems to spawn more C suite occupants and I am not sure it does anything to stop medical fraud. Hello Scooter Store.
Thank you for listening and I hope you will all be well and know you are all loved.
