How will Health Care Reform Affect Medical Billing?

From what I have learned about proposed health care reform, both the Senate and House bills, little will change in the way medical billing is peformed. The biggest reason physician practices have billing staff, or outsource to medial billing companies is: adminstrative complexity. Did you know that the Medicare enrollment form for practitioners is 55 pages long??? PSP has a full-time Credentialing Coordinator who is dedicated to enrolling phyiscians in different insurance plans (every plan has their own enrollment form). When it comes to claims submission, insurance companies use the same form (HCFA 1500), but many require different items in different fields. We track the rejections we get from insurance companies just to be sure that we are accurately completing every claim form. This is labor intensive, but it helps our clients get paid more, and faster. So, don't expect too much to change in how bills are submitted and paid when health care reform finally passes. We can just be happy that, hopefully, more people will be covered by health insurance.