The waste of administrative resources in modern healthcare has become a recognizable trait in the American healthcare system. In order to receive help, pay for the procedures, or even get insurance, an average American citizen has to go through numerous administrative checks and regulations, as well as push a tedious amount of paperwork to get things done.
Professionals, politicians, and journalists alike have criticized the American healthcare administrative apparatus, going as far as to call it “an administrative monstrosity, a truly bizarre mélange of thousands of payers with payment systems that differ for no socially beneficial reason, as well as staggeringly complex public systems with mind-boggling administered prices and other rules expressing distinctions that can only be regarded as weird” (Bentley, Effros, Palar, & Keeler, 2008, p. 630).
This system, in its current form, possesses numerous flaws, as it often forces the documents and information to move too long. In addition, its overinflated number of staffing personnel puts additional expenses upon the budget, as all of these people need to be paid and granted working privileges.
However, the flaw in this system is not just due to its inefficient structure. The reason why this much paperwork is required in our modern medical system is due to the fact that hospitals have to manage several paying stakeholders. As it stands, government remuneration and insurance payments are managed from different sources, which means that the hospital has to manage separate paperwork flows for each, in addition to direct payments made by the clients. These wasted resources not only slow down the process and directly affect the quality of provided care, but also make it more expensive for the end-user (Bentley et al., 2008).
References
Bentley, T. G., Effros, R. M., Palar, K., & Keeler, E. B. (2008). Waste in the U.S. health care system: A conceptual framework. The Milbank Quarterly, 86(4), 629-659.