Health care billing process is costly and inefficient, study concludes

Health care in the United States is really expensive, and one of the reasons is that managing health care bills is really, really expensive.

Just how expensive? At one large academic medical center, the cost of collecting payments for a single primary care doctor is upward of $99,000 a year.

And billing for primary care visits is a bargain compared with billing for trips to the emergency room, a hospital stay or a surgical