Bureaucracy consumes one-quarter of US hospitals' budgets, twice as much as other nations

Health Affairs study says single-payer reform could save $150 billion annually on hospital overhead

A study of hospital administrative costs in eight nations published today in the September issue of Health Affairs finds that hospital bureaucracy consumed 25.3 percent of hospital budgets in the U.S. in 2011, far more than in other nations.

Administrative costs were lowest (about 12 percent) in Scotland and Canada, whose single-payer systems fund hospitals through global, lump-sum budgets, much as a fire department is funded in the U.S.

The study is the first analysis of administrative costs across multiple nations with widely varying health systems. It was carried out by an international team from the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and the Netherlands, and was coordinated by researchers at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the London School of Economics.