Administration accounts for roughly 14 percent of what the United States spends on health care, or about $360 billion per year. About half of all administrative costs — $163 billion in 2009 — are borne by Medicare, Medicaid and insurance companies.

Could this piece of plastic save the US billions each year?

Writing for the NYT, Ezekiel J Emanuel explains how Billions are Wasted on Billing in the USA.

"LAST year I had to have a minor biopsy. Every time I went in for an appointment, I had to fill out a form requiring my name, address, insurance information, emergency contact person, vaccination history, previous surgical history and current medical problems, medications and allergies. I must have done it four times in just three days. Then, after my procedure, I received bills — and, even more annoying, statements of charges that said they weren’t bills — almost daily, from the hospital, the surgeon, the primary care doctor, the insurance company."

"Imagine that repeated millions of times daily and you have one of the biggest money wasters in our health care system. Administration accounts for roughly 14 percent of what the United States spends on health care, or about $360 billion per year."

Now look at France.

Billing is incredibly simple. For most doctor's visits and procedure it amounts to presenting a little green card: La Carte Vitale. It has a memory chip.

The French Carte Vitale contains, for every French citizen, all information necessary for payment (those forms you fill out each time in the US which require an army of administrative personnel to process).

In addition, with the permission of the patient it can also contain all medicial information for the past 12 months. When a French patient visits a physician, pharmacy or hospital, the Carte Vitale is simply placed in a reader, and necessary information about the patient appears on the physician's computer screen. Billing and payment information is transmitted automatically to French Social Security/Assurance Maladie for automatic reimbursement.

Even hospital stays are billed easily!

France of course has its problems too. But wasting billions on insanely inefficient overlapping administration of billing is not one of them.

US Medicare, like French Assurance Maladie, is a single payer system.

A solution exists to save billions in useless administrative costs while improving service at the same time.

Why not grab it?

Best practices, benchmarking, process reengineering--it doesn't matter what you call it. French medical billing practices are faster, cheaper and easier.