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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (376320)	4/5/2008 1:07:23 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578511

It seems like Medicaid and Medicare are the more pressing concerns right now. All the state Medicaid programs are trainwrecks, for the most part; many of our clients do not accept Medicaid for that reason (and because if you can't collect the money from Medicaid, you have no recourse against the patient). But Medicare can just run over the healthcare providers at will, which is what they do. Last year, Part B made huge cuts in payments to providers. Which they can get away with because providers in most specialties MUST serve Medicare patients since there are so many (the lucky ones are peds clinics and obstetrics which don't have a major Medicare component). I do believe there is a point below which providers will start to bail on Medicare. We often consult with Medicare providers today who have allowed their practices to develop too large a proportion of Medicare patients -- this is a disaster for the provider, since he cannot make a decent living off of Medicare. The only thing he can do is to quit taking new Medicare patients. It is exactly what happens when you get government-run healthcare -- the quality declines because you take away the profit motive. The reason we have the best healthcare in the world is our system of commercial insurance effectively subsidizes the low-paying care from MCARE/MCAID. If you have a situation where government controls the healthcare system, the incentive to develop new drugs, to study and become a highly specialized provider, to pay through the nose for new imaging technologies, etc., is gone with government healthcare.