Medicare - "efficient"? Not!
Amy Ridenour has some thoughts on socialized medicine, as advocated by an editorial in The New Republic. Her post goes into a lot of detail on the whole issue, but I'd like to add my two cents here.
She mentions:
"Medicare isn't only popular. It's also efficient," says the New Republic. It doesn't mention that nearly 30 percent of physicians are refusing to accept new Medicare patients; that hospitals spend a half hour on paperwork for every hour of care delivered under Medicare; that Medicare is insolvent, as it is underfunded by $29 trillion dollars; or that Medicare's archaic, overly-bureaucratic process for the adoption of new technologies results in needless deaths.
When I was dealing with my dad's healthcare issues, beginning about 1999, Medicare was helpful in some ways, but a real mess in others. When his health first began to decline, he had no so-called "primary care physician." After his first hospitalization, I was expected to go through the phone book and call doctors just to find one that accepted Medicare patients. The hospital was no help to us there.
We found one, because I was able to rely on contacts I'd made when I worked with private charities. Then that doctor suddenly and inexplicably stopped accepting it, and started sending the bills directly to me. After sorting out that mess, we were back to square one.
As I live in a "retirement destination" kind of community, with an unusual number of senior citizens, the percentage of doctors refusing Medicare patients is much higher than normal. The doctor my dad eventually ended up with was one who, for some reason had suddenly decided to accept Medicare. I was told by friends in the field he had upwards of 2000 patients. Fortunately Dad didn't need much medical care. If he'd had any kind of complicated health problems, I don't know what we would've done.
Another situation I encountered was that somebody along the line in the nursing homes, physical therapists, etc, was billing Medicare $685 a month for an electric bed appliance we never saw, and he certainly didn't use. I tried to report this to Medicare, but they refused to speak to me, insisting they had to speak directly to my dad, and would not understand he was not capable of doing so.
Anybody who says Medicare is efficient surely has not had any personal experience in dealing with this bureaucratic tangle. It would only take half an hour in any given retirement complex to see what a massive problem it is for all concerned.