Tatort

Aetna's Supposed Healthcare IT Prowess: The Bar is Set Awfully Low

The US spends - annually - $700 per capita more than Canada in healthcare admin costs. The US also experiences around $350 per capita in annual costs associated with fraud (and I doubt this figure accurately accounts for the tremendous level of upcoding that occurs in the system, which if not fraud is at the very least abuse). The average general practitioner in the US nets 4X what his counterpart in France makes (2.7 vs. Italy, 2X vs. Australia, 1.6X vs. Japan, 1.3 vs. the UK); the salary differentials for specialists are even higher. Hospitals in the US are probably the most inefficient organizations in the entire country (yes, even more inefficient than insurance companies!). Medical errors cost the system tens of billions of dollars annually, and the funny thing is that they actually hurt patients but under our fee-for-service reimbusement system actually inflate revenues for those who cause the errors to begin with!

There's a lot of blame to be spread around when evaluating our overly high-costing healthcare system.