Christopher Morley joins us this week to talk about prior authorizations, or PAs – a bureaucratic headache well known to anyone in primary care in which a physician’s office must complete additional paperwork or phone calls to a patient’s insurance company in order to get a medication or procedure covered by the insurance. This used to be a fairly rare occurrence, but it has dramatically increased in frequency over the last 20 years or so. Dr. Morley set out with some colleagues to try to quantify how much the PA process may cost, and moreover, to help us all think about who pays those costs in reality – ultimately, it is our patients.