Medicare is a mess...

and anyone who thinks otherwise either doesn't have to deal with Medicare or hasn't been paying attention.

Other then the time my mother was raising her children, she worked in the healthcare field.  She started out after college in secretary positions to medical practices overseeing the office staff and billing.  When she returned to work in the 1960's it was to update the entire medical records department in a major hospital in the Houston medical center setting up the coding for all the files - a job that took over six months with a staff of four.  She later became the assistant administrator of that hospital and resigned that position to be executive secretary for the x-ray department.

My mother understood how healthcare worked and when Medicare was first proposed she declared it a mess and predicted it would eventually lead to wrecking the healthcare field.  My mother was very smart.


From Reason.com

Medicare Whac-A-Mole 
Why health care price controls always fail

 House Republicans, you may have heard, are trying to “end Medicare as we know it.” And well they should—Medicare as we know it is the nation’s biggest fiscal disaster. For years members of Congress and the executive branch have been trying, and failing, to find ways to restrain the growth of government health spending on seniors. Medicare is a $500 billion program on track to become a $1 trillion program before hitting insolvency in 2024, even under the rosiest projections. The program looms as a threat not only to itself but to the budgetary health of the nation. It is the single largest driver of long-term federal debt. read the rest

and

From: Questions and Observation

Medicare’s Doctor (and patient) trap