I often tell people that if all I had to do was take care of patients, life would be grand. It is the countless hours of dealing with the administrative aspects of health care that have practically ruined the practice of medicine for many physicians. You should care; it takes away from our time with you.

TheHill.com noted that physicians and their staff spent more than 15 hours per week complying with quality reporting requirements and that for every hour a physician spends with patients, an additional two hours are consumed completing administrative tasks related to the visit. This meaningless (to physicians, anyway) work has costs in both time and money, leads to burnout, and is increasingly mentioned as the reason for early retirement. I, for one, found myself daydreaming in a committee meeting the other day and I calculated that it was 3,361 days until my 65th birthday. Thats nine years, two months and 15 days. No, I am not planning to retire early, but sometimes I sure wish I could. Health care needs reform.

The average person thought Obamacare was health care reform. In reality, Obamacare did nothing to actually improve the health care system; it simply added more people to the rolls. Dont get me wrong. Having more people insured is not a bad thing. But we need more than just additional enrollees in a broken system.

After Trump was elected, there was an initial, overly optimistic assumption that Obamacare was on its last leg. Recent infighting among policy makers suggests Obamacare may be more like the proverbial cat with nine lives. I only hope true reform is part of whatever replacement or repair Congress and the president come up with.

In particular, lets hope some of that reform will significantly scale back a bloated, paranoid bureaucracy that sucks hundreds of billions of dollars out of health care that could go to those who actually care for patients. And, perhaps, some could go back into the taxpayers pockets.

Back in 2012, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett called health care the tapeworm of the American economy. To be more accurate, the federal government is health cares tapeworm. In an online article in Medical Economics last year, Ryan Gamlin, who studies what drives inefficiency, waste and harm in U.S. health care, found that as countries spend a larger percentage of their health care dollars on administration (as opposed to public health, or providing patient care, for example), things get worse for patients and health care providers. High administrative expenditures seem to be associated with negative experiences of providing and receiving health care. That is a nice way of saying theres a ton of money wasted going to paper pushers.

Helen Adamopoulos, writing in Beckers Hospital Review in 2014, noted that U.S. hospital administrative costs account for more than 25 percent of hospital spending, more than double that of Canada, for example, where hospitals receive global, lump-sum budgets. In contrast, U.S. hospitals must bill per patient or DRG (diagnosis-related group), requiring additional clerical and management workers and specialized IT systems. They also have to negotiate payment rates with multiple payers with differing billing procedures and documentation requirements, driving up administrative spending. Not to mention all the personnel, time and IT required to satisfy CMSs (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) monstrous appetite for quality and safety data, with the ever-present threat of fraud and abuse hanging over every unintentional misstep.

What should be a simple process of billing for services provided is a minefield. And anyone who has ever tried to understand a hospital bill knows it is an impossible task. Aliya Jiwani, writing in BMC Health Services Research, notes that billing and insurance-related administrative costs in 2012 were estimated to be $471 billion and that 80 percent of this spending, which provides little to no added value to the health care system, could be saved with a simplified financing system. Jiwani predicted that greater use of deductibles under Obamacare will likely further increase administrative costs, stating, Empirical evidence from similar reform in Massachusetts is not encouraging: Exchanges added 4 percent to health plan costs, and the reform sharply increased administrative staffing compared with other states.

A CNBC report of a Health Affairs study tagged the extra administrative costs of Obamacare at more than a quarter of a trillion dollars, an average of $1,375 per newly insured person, per year, from 2012 through 2022. The Health Affairs blog authors reported, The overhead cost equals a whopping 22.5 percent of the total estimated $2.76 trillion in all federal government spending for the Affordable Care Act programs during that time.

What do I wish could be different in our health care system? In March, I will discuss some specific changes that would reduce the administrative burden on health care providers and, in many ways, return us to a simpler, more direct, and frankly better transaction of health care.

Dr. Sid Roberts is a radiation oncologist at the Arthur Temple Sr. Regional Cancer Center in Lufkin. He can be reached at sroberts@memorialhealth.org. Previous columns may be found at srob61.blogspot.com.

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ROBERTS: What I would like to see in health care reform, for starters - Lufkin Daily News