Quote:You said that their was a disproportionate amount of reimbursement from the private sector making the medicare payments unsustainable. My question was more of a theoretical one. I.E. if there was no insurance market dolling out payments and it was all medicare or something similar would the payments for doctors go up? I might not have understood what you said so please correct me.

You're on to something, B.


From what I've seen, doctors and smaller clinics are still able to practice even with a large portion of patients on Medicare.


The issue is a lot of people confuse Medicaid with Medicare. Medicaid gets a lot less funding, federally...


Also, one must remember that hospitals treat a lot of folks that have no insurance which hurts the bottom line.


Cutting out private insurers would not have the adverse effect on health care as some may argue.


Like I said, I've seen the books of private practitioners and small clinics who deal with Medicare patients, and Medicaid patients for that matter.


From my experience of what I've seen, they are running in the black, comfortably.

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