You’re a doctor. You need to bring in $3,000 apiece for your most common procedure. But Medicare and Medicaid – which pay for about half your patients – have just told you they’re only going to pay you one-third of what they’re billed. What do you do? You don’t need to be a CPA to know the answer is to start billing everyone $4,500 for your procedure. The half of your patients who pay full price thus pay $1,500 extra, covering the $1,500 shortfall for each Medicare/Medicaid-covered procedure.
Now the tricky question: If someone who’s NOT on Medicaid or Medicare visits your medical office to have this procedure done, and promptly pays his or her $4,500 in full, how much has he or she paid you, this year?
And the answer is: $6,000. Those who are not on Medicare or Medicaid are known as “taxpayers.” Where do you think Medicare/Medicaid got the $1,500 to pay for the welfare patient? The taxpayer pays $4,500 for his or her own procedure, and then an extra $1,500 in taxes to fund someone else’s.
For all those who have written in insisting that we need government to pay our medical bills because they’re so high, let’s keep this simple:
Medical bills are really high because the government promises to pay most of them, the same way government-backed “college loans” have driven up the cost of college, by allowing colleges to charge you whatever you can afford plus whatever the government will loan.
Perhaps it’s still technically a minority of Americans who are currently “covered” by Medicare and Medicaid. But since the old and the poor (the latter often skimping on health maintenance and prevention) use the most medicine and medical care, the majority of medical COSTS are covered and “paid for” by these two socialist programs.
Some say as much as two thirds.
If we switched over to “cash only” medicine tomorrow – no government or even private insurance payments allowed – what do you suppose would happen to medical costs?
Remember, the doctor who’s been accustomed to billing $4,500 for a procedure really only gets $1,500 from Medicare/Medicaid, a scheme that’s already jacked up YOUR cost by 50 percent.
Of that $1,500, another $500 (and that may be understated) goes to pay doctors’ non-medical office staff who negotiate bills and payments with the private and government “insurance” firms.
So the doc who “billed” $4,500 expected to get about half that. The rest is only “in there” to buy off this unholy private-public “insurance” bureaucracy.
If he could fire all those non-medical “billing” people in his office, and if the doctor could again assume that most patients might pay the full amount billed on a timely basis, in cash, he or she could drop many posted charges from $4,500 to $2,000 overnight.
Read the rest at http://www.lewrockwell.com/suprynowicz/suprynowicz100.html
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