Healthcare is a hot topic in the United States and has been so for many decades.
It is estimated that America's estimated 318 million people made over a billion visits to physicians; that's about three visits per every child, man, and woman, putting the country's healthcare cost in 2014 at an astounding $4 trillion.
The cost is likely to increase for at least two reasons.
First, the number of Americans getting older is increasing every day, thus making it more probable that people would be visiting doctors even more.
Second, the most common diagnosis after visits to a doctor is reportedly hypertension.
Given our lifestyle, that is likely not to improve any time soon.
Those realities point to gigantic physician billing and ambulatory surgery center billing in the coming years, mandating more extensive physician billing service requirements.
Those stark facts have created serious dilemmas for many doctors around the country.
Physician and other health provider operations are run just like any other business.
They need to make profits by increasing revenues or keeping in check, if not decreasing, operating costs.
That is hard to do for most physicians and clinics given the overwhelming administrative load and cost involved in treating patients.
That's why most healthcare providers go to one of the top medical billing companies that, essentially, take the medical records, turn them into proper codes using specialized software, and send them to insurance companies that would administer the payment.
Unless the business is part of one of the many large physician practice management companies, it would be next to impossible for a healthcare provider to deal directly with the insurance company.
Think of the process: when you go to a physician, a hospital, or an emergency center, an electronic health record is made of the visit, indicating, in simple terms, what you complained about, what the doctor diagnosed, or what further diagnosis was recommended, and what, if any, medication was recommended.
Those electronic records are then "translated" by medical coders and medical billers and that's one of the things that distinguishes best medical billing companies from the others.
The better and faster staff they have, the more money they can save for physicians and other healthcare providers.
The US healthcare industry might be a trillion dollar industry, but many of the doctors and physicians running small to medium size businesses simply would not survive without such medical billing companies.