Who knew the cost of medical billing was such a significant factor of the high cost of health care?

A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association spells out in dollars and cents just how much it costs to manage bills for health care. The Los Angeles Times reports that, according to the analysis, the cost of collecting payments for just one primary-care physician at a large academic medical center runs more than $99,000 a year.

Are you shocked yet? The study's researchers, from Duke University and Harvard Business School, reconstructed the whole life cycle of a medical bill to calculate exactly how much the process of billing costs. Beginning with the making of an appointment by a patient and ending when the health system banks the payment for treatment, researchers subjected five types of what they termed "patient encounters" to analysis.