Those that use Medicare to show that government can run health care

miami_thomas

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Jan 20, 2011
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You should stop now as I don't think you know enough information about medicare operations. First, the federal government does not run medicare or medicaid, these programs are actually run by the states.

Second, even state governments do not implement medicare or medicaid they simply pay the bills. Actually medicare and medicaid are implemented by as a TPA meaning a private company does all the processing, customer service, etc... and the states just foot the bill. Not only do private companies make money on this but they make more money than they do on the privately insured. See Centene corporation and its profits. Centene is a medicare and medicare only insurance corporation and you can see from its profits it is way better to do medicare than private insurance.

Further, medicare does not actually pay the doctors full price. Do any of you remember during the debate when preventing providers from charging different prices came up but quickly died? It died quickly because if doctors and hospitals were not allowed to cost shift then none of them would even accept medicare patients. That is because they shift the losses from medicare to private insurance. The average family at this time is paying almost 2000 dollars a year in premiums that goes to medicare. Even the government did research on this a few years back. You can find this by looking up 'Medicare cost shifting" on google. That is not all guess what is in the health care bill. If you guessed that medicare reimbursement rate is in the health care bill you guessed right.

Currently their is a 20 percent gap between what medicare pays and what it actually costs. It was about to become even larger on Jan 1, 2011 but congress and the president passed a temporary fix in the lame duck session. But that was only a one year fix and the health care bills budget estimates were based on the medicare reimbursement prior to the fix. So as you can guess the estimates that the new bill will reduce the deficit are now no longer accurate. According the the new health care bill the rate would not go up and that will not work. By 2016, when the bill actually goes fully in the reimbursement rates would be about 60 cents on the dollar or 40% below the actual costs.

Lastly, the new and wonderful bill has changed the reimbursements to be based on outcome rather than services performed. Sounds good right. Wrong what are doctors going to do? They will start trying to accept only the healthy seniors instead of the sick ones so they can get more reimbursement for their services. What a truly wonderful system.

Don't tell me it is not true because my mom just this year has become eligible for medicare. She has diabetes, is obese, and has sever back problems. So when she retired this year and lost her private insurance guess what. She was unable to find a doctor that would service her. She was on pain medicine and ran out then went into a form of phsycosis when she had withdrawals then even go worse because her sugar level went out of control and caused even further phsycosis. She kicked my dad out of the house believing they were divorced and believed she was sent by god to save the world. We was unable to get any help until the police finally picked her up for running naked through the neighborhood looking for the disciple David.

We are still having difficulty finding her a doctor and have been unable to get her pain treatment for her back. She now is on no pain medicine and spends almost the whole day in bed. At least she is now mentally stable but this story will not be the end. Wait and see more will come. You want to talk about the sick losing their insurance the sick medicare patients will lose their insurance as they become not profitable to doctors.

My dad is pursuing a lawsuit against the doctor but he has no way to sue the government for wrongful care. Do you really want to place you health care in the hands of someone that can not be held responsible for harmful actions? If it was a private insurance company involved in all of this he could have sued them.
 
Lastly, the new and wonderful bill has changed the reimbursements to be based on outcome rather than services performed. Sounds good right. Wrong what are doctors going to do? They will start trying to accept only the healthy seniors instead of the sick ones so they can get more reimbursement for their services. What a truly wonderful system.
Death panels by any other name....
 

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