Medicare isn't cheap...

[Cleita]

22. Jacki Schechner, the news person on Current TV whose also

very interested in health care explained it this morning. It seems like the baseline is so bloated by profit motives that Medicare is often accused of not paying enough. She brought up the example of someone being billed $100 for a disposable scrubs for the doctor. Clearly, they shouldn't cost that much. I notice on my Medicare bills that they only approve a fraction of the billing so they really aren't overpaying. I was bill $10,000 for a surgical facility last year. Medicare only paid $2,500 (nurses, equipment and all) which the facility accepted.

I was so shocked I actually called them up and asked them why they billed so much? They said it was standard procedure to make sure they got full payment from various insurances and government health programs. However, what does the uninsured person do, who is made to pay the full charge of what is arbitrarily charged by care providers? Medicare is doing what it can to contain costs. We need better laws regulating this and I believe Obamacare is trying to address this.

So we do pay two to three times as much per capita for our health care in this country, but it's not Medicare that is inflating this. Look for another scapegoat.