AMA Issues Report Card, Rating Health Insurers

Boston (dbTechno) - The American Medical Association released their first National Health Insurer Report Card, looking closely at health insurance companies and ranking them accordingly.

The National Health Insurer Report Card was launched on June 16th by the AMA with the help of the group Cure for Claims.

The study looked at Medicare, along with 7 private health insurance companies including Aetna, Conventry Health Care, UnitedHealthcare, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shielf, CIGNA Corp. Humana Inc., and Health Net. Inc.

The two studied over 3 million claims to health insurance companies in a random sample.

The goal of the report card is to reduce the cost of claims processing to doctors.

They found some alarming things which revolve around wasted money by the companies.

What they found in the study was that over $200 billion is wasted every single year by health insurers not processing medical claims in an efficient manner.

The company with the lowest score was UnitedHealthcare, as they had the lowest rate of contract compliance at 62%, compared to 71% for Aetna and 98% for Medicare.

The claims data was from July 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008.