Medicare Rules: Bring 'Em On

Thanks to a Clinton-era reinterpretation, you can not opt out of Medicare as a patient without also forfeiting your Social Security payments. In favor of that rule too?

That is one heck of a "should".

What amuses me is that anyone thought price controls would work. Okay, so you’ve reduced the price for a service. Doctors and hospitals know how much money they need, so what do they do? Increase services. A couple of decades of this nonsense and you get people running around wailing “it’s not cost, it’s utilization!” as if they were independent.

Of course there is another thing doctors & hospitals can do to deal with low medicare fees – transfer the cost to the private sector (often also with increased utilization). Back when Obamacare was just getting rolling there was a healthcare conference in D.C. A speaker from MEDPAC mentioned this problem, and pointed it’s finger squarely at who it saw as the culprit – private insurance companies. See, the problem wasn’t that Medicare was squeezing too hard, it was that private industry wasn’t matching it pound for pound.

I guess no one in the gov’t is worried about the balloon popping.

Ring Cycle: in German, or translation?

[comment deleted for rudeness] -- ed. [Email the webmaster@econlib.org to request restoring your comment privileges--Econlib Ed.]