by Caitlin Kenney

On Monday's podcast, we tried to help you sort through some of the vague and confusing parts of medical billing, like why does insurance pay only $400 when the charge says $1,200?

Now a new pilot program by Blue Cross Blue Shield and America's Insurance Health Plans will test a fix for the messy billing process. Working with state insurance providers, the national groups are launching websites in New Jersey and Ohio next month that promise a more streamlined system. The sites give doctors a single place to find all of a patient's insurance information. Columbus Business First spoke to Mark Jarvis, senior director of practice economics at the Ohio State Medical Association, about the plan:

Jarvis estimated doctors spend more than three hours a week each on office administration while their staffs spend more than 58 hours on a practice's operation. The administrative cost of the typical way of following eligibility and claims — through fax transmissions and phone calls — can add up to $8 per claim but the portal would slash the cost to $1 for a provider.

 

"If a patient comes in and presents an insurance card now, [doctors] have to go to (various) Web sites or get on the phone. ... This provides one interface for all of those," Jarvis said Monday.

The sites also allow consumers to check the cost of procedure prior to having it.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that administrative costs for private health insurers were $90 billion in 2006, about 12 percent of private insurance premiums. This figure doesn't include the labor costs of the hundreds of hours doctors and hospitals spend dealing with different insurance providers and policies.