Dear Mr. President Obama,
I’m sitting here looking at the Medicare Summary Notice for my wife’s MRI and something doesn’t look right. The clinic’s bill is for $3,008.00. Medicare approved the sum of $385.47 for this procedure. So, I question, "Why does the clinic charge $3008 and Medicare approves only $385.47. Has the clinic charged way too much or is Medicare cheating the clinic? Or, maybe both questions can be answered in the affirmative?" What is the answer to this question? I suspect that the answer is somewhere in between; that is, the clinic is not, on the average, charging too much for this procedure AND Medicare is paying too little. What is happening? I believe that because Medicare pays too little (for budget reasons?), and the clinic, knowing this, raises its scheduled fee to make up for Medicare’s shortage. On the average, therefore, the clinic gets paid from its non-Medicare patients for the lost revenue from Medicare. It is biased in favor of Medicare and, especially against the non-Medicare patients. This happens on all of the Medicare Summary Notices which both my wife and myself receive for our medical services. The current medical payment system is broken and it needs to be fixed.
Based on this evidence, I believe that a single payer health insurance system that insures everybody and treats both the medical providers and their patients fairly is the only way to fix the broken health insurance and payment system. Please work to make such a system come to fruition.
Respectfully,
Donald L. Cleven
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