(It could be a problem for those of us who will turn blue in the ER waiting to be seen because the staff is occupied treating Medicaid patients with the sniffles.)
The noose will be closed when there is a law that doctors have to take Medicaid patients. This can either be a condition of licensure, or it could be a condition of Medicare participation. At that point, the gov’t will control the reimbursement levels and be the single payer, even though in name alone there may remain multiple programs. There has never been a need, tactically, for the left to pass a single payer law. They are already there.
Then you have to include Medicare and Tricare Life, which is Ret. Military over 65 secondary to Medicare. They are both admined out of the same offices. You really only need to have filed to your RX, hospital or doctor, or PT or test to trigger the TFL. And both reimburse the medical community poorly. Husband’s who is the Ret. SCPO 2 day ER stay, because the small hospital had no rooms left, for a sudden BP spike, was $50K, the 2 agencies paid the facility $2,500, and sent us a medicine co-pay.
The biggest thing is the FRAUD in all the programs.
Medicare Fraud: http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2013/02/22/how-big-is-medicare-fraud/
If you do Welker’s math, the annual cost of fraud ranges from $75 billion to $250 billion. That’s a lot of our hard-earned retirement money.
Indiana Medicaid pays out $130 Million on health care for ILLEGALS! That is only one small state, not one of those massive states like Kali.