Doctors are used to being rated by health insurance companies rate doctors but now the tables are to be turned in an effort to protect doctors' earnings. The American Medical Association has announced plans to rate and evaluate insurance companies in its first health insurance report card at the group's annual meeting. The focus of the health report cards will be to find out how quickly and how accurately doctors get paid.

"The goal of the AMA campaign is to hold health insurance companies accountable for making claims processing more cost-effective and transparent, and to educate and empower physicians so they are no longer at the mercy of a chaotic payment system that take countless hours away from patient care," said AMA Board Member William A. Dolan, MD.

"Physicians are spending 14 percent of their total revenue to simply obtain what they've earned,"
"Eliminating the inefficiencies of the billing and collection process would produce significant savings that could be better used to enhance patient care and help reduce overall health care costs."

"To diagnose the areas of greatest concern within the claims processing system, the AMA has developed its first online rating of health insurers," Dr. Dolan added.
The report card is an effort to reduce the cost of claims processing to doctors and help them as they negotiate contracts with insurance companies, he said. The report card will help patients if it reduces wasteful administrative costs, Dolan added. The report card compares Medicare and seven national commercial health insurers on the timeliness and accuracy of claims processing. It is based on a random sample drawn from 3 million claims.

There are no grades like A, B and C, and many of the technical measures may not mean much to most patients. But business leaders and health policy makers are interested in cutting an estimated annual $210 billion in wasted administrative claims processing costs, AMA leaders said. Four years ago, Dr. Marcy Zwelling got so frustrated with the time and cost of making sure she was paid accurately by insurers that she stopped dealing with them. She now runs a so-called "boutique" practice. Most of her patients pay her an annual fee out of their own pockets.

"The best thing is, I get to be a doctor" instead of a claims processor, said Zwelling, of Los Alamitos, Calif. She says she doesn't make any more money than she did when she accepted insurance, but she has more time with patients. United Healthcare had the lowest rate of contract compliance, according to the AMA report. About 62 percent of medical services billed were paid by United Healthcare at the contracted rate, compared with 71 percent for Aetna and 98 percent for Medicare.

Medicare performed better than the private insurers in most areas, said Dr. Lawrence Casalino, a University of Chicago health economist and former physician. Commercial insurance plans compete by promising employers that they are tough on holding down the cost of claims, he said.

"There's no question that administrative costs for doctors and the country would be a lot lower in a single-payer system," Casalino said in an interview after the meeting. But a market-based system has advantages of competition, choice and innovation, he said. "Are the benefits enough to justify the cost?"

Peter Lee of the Pacific Business Group on Health welcomed the report card, but said he hoped the AMA would look at a broader range of areas that would be helpful to consumers.
"Increased payments to physicians’ means increased premiums and increased costs in a system that is spiralling out of control," Lee said.

Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America's Health Insurance Plans, said that for claims to be processed accurately and quickly it takes two parties: insurers and doctors. She said that while insurance companies that rate doctors generally share the information with doctors before they make it public, the AMA did not share its report with insurers before releasing it online Monday.

"It would have been constructive for that same courtesy to be extended to us," Pisano said.

The AMA is holding its five-day policy-making meeting in Chicago. The meeting runs through Wednesday.