Letter: Health professionals doing clerical work

Your editorial stated that one reason for America's debt crisis is our soaring health care spending ["Just too much to bear," Aug. 7]. I couldn't agree more, but your solutions only touch the surface.

I agree that many health care resources are spent on patients' last years of life, often to no useful purpose. However, it is also often due to our overregulated health care system forcing professionals away from the patient and into a documentation philosophy.

Doctors and nurses are spending too much time with voluminous paperwork requirements to meet health regulations and to shield them from the attorney waiting to catch an error. Then administrators are forced to resolve nuisance claims that are cheaper to settle than fight, even when there was no error or fault. Washington's health care reform never touched on these huge cost issues.

Look at the average doctor's office today, staffed with more clerical and billing employees than health care providers. They are there in large part to make sure the physicians and nurses are paid for their services in a web of regulations from insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid trying to pay them as little as possible. There is a complicated manual for every insurance company and payment source, with different billing and computer requirements.

Hospitals, long-term care providers and doctors' offices use registered professional nurses to argue why the care should be provided. When they are unsuccessful, the physician spends too much time on the phone and in writing, just to get approval for needed treatment or payment. Local pharmacists also spend too much of their precious time with insurance company regulations and Medicare Part D requirements. These are all highly educated and highly paid professionals, doing too much clerical work.

It has taken away our best and brightest, when there is a shortage of primary care physicians who want to treat patients, not deal with an overregulated, complicated payment system.

Diane Mertz-Hart, Smithtown

Editor's note: The writer is a licensed nursing home administrator.