Some stories are best told by numbers. Here are the numbers that tell two stories: how patients have gotten lost in the morass of the health insurance system, and how doctors have gotten lost in it.
Patients: Researchers from the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee analyzed information covering the period from 2002 to June, 2009 submitted by insurers to the California Department of Managed Care. During that time, six leading insurers in California rejected 22 percent of all claims received (45.7 million claims). The rejection rate was even higher for the first six months of 2009, with PacifiCare at 39.6 percent, Cigna at 32.7 percent, HealthNet at 30 percent, Kaiser Permanente at 28.3 percent, and Blue Cross at 27.9 percent, though Aetna showed a very low rejection rate of 6.4 percent.
Doctors: Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Center for Health Statistics and the Current Population Survey shows that while the number of physicians in the U.S. has increased by approximately 200 percent since 1970, the number of insurance administrators has increased by 3,000 percent. Most of that growth has taken place since the early 1990s, when the number of insurance administrators was about five times as great as in the 1970s. By the late '90s, the number of administrators was 20 times as great as in the early '70s; in 2008 it was 30 times as great. The graph above conveys the magnitude of the change.
