"Billions Wasted on Billing"

Every time you go to the hospital  for whatever reason, do you see your parents filling out multiple forms and signing papers? I know I have. I have watched my mother tediously fill out form after form about my medical history, insurance information, and signing off permission on other forms. Ever think about how much paper gets wasted for the multiple times you have to fill out the same forms over and over again? Well, Ezekiel J. Emanuel does his research in his New York Times article "Billions Wasted on Billing". The United States could be saving $32 billion dollars a year if we could just transform the physical labor of filling out medical forms to an electronic system. Not only that, it could provide patient history guidelines. The example that Emanuel uses is that if a doctor sees a patient with frequent back pain, the doctor could just prescribe physical therapy instead of ordering an MRI. Sometimes its the little things that we never really notice that if changed could make a huge difference. I believe that the United States could be using that $32 billion for better reasons than medical forms. Besides, we are in the Information Age...why not continue to use the amazing technology we have?

Ezekiel J. Emanuel uses a large amount of statistics with logos and some pathos in his opinion article "Billions Wasted on Billing". The statistics appeal to the logos of the audience and some of them are quite shocking. In all the costs of health care, fourteen percent is spent on administration or in the grand scheme of things, $360 billion per year. Ezekiel also breaks down the percentages of where the money is going and uses research from a Harvard economist, David Cutler. The statistics and percentages both establish Emanuel's creditability on the topic and show that he did his research. The pathos technique that Emanuel uses is that he describes his personal situation with filling out medical forms four times in three days with his frustration. This technique allows the audience to emphasize with Emanuel and make connections to their own experiences of filling out multiple medical forms. The author also proposes suggestions and problems that would be solved with a universal technology system that kept all these medical administration records. The "Billions Wasted on Billing" article discusses the waste of health care money on administration and how it could change with the switch to a technology system.

Source: Emanuel, Ezekiel J.. "Billions Wasted on Billing." The New York Times 13 Nov. 2011, sec. Opinion: n. pag. The New York Times. Web. 13 Nov. 2011.