Link: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/01-4

Looking at millions of individual bills that makeup the 2.7 trillion dollars of annual health care costs opens a gigantic window on the massive waste, redundancy, profiteering, fraud and sometimes criminal over-billing.Americans continue to spend more on health care than patients anywhere else. Moreover, France and Germany, Italy, England, Canada, Belgium, Sweden and all other western countries plus Japan and Taiwan cover almost all their citizens, unlike the U.S. where 50,000,000 people are uninsured.These include higher administrative costs to deal with insurance paperwork, higher insurance company profits and executive compensation and less developed electronic health records leading to costly errors.Health care bills come with hefty levels of fraud.fully ten percent of all health care expenditures are the result of computerized billing fraud and abuse. That will be $270 billion this year.But why the health insurance companies, a formidable force do not do more to stop fraudulent billing practices, is a puzzle.