alt Hacker NewsMedicare prices are too low to operate on. They generally factor in the bare minimum or slightly less for the variable costs of a procedure but severely under value the fixed costs of providing the same procedure. So those costs largely get pushed to commercial payors as those are the only ones who can shoulder it.
There’s plenty of arguements about waste and executive compensation but when I was a healthcare CFO we had our financials separated where I could see individual hospital performance and all the executive/corporate stuff was separate and it still was an issue as basic capex was hard to keep up with in a hospital that had a low % of commercial patients.
Sure you’re not thinking of Medicaid? Medicare was generally pretty good for reimbursement. When my wife treated Medicaid patients, she often lost money on the cost of the supplies used to treat them, let alone rent and paying the staff etc etc. Most doctors who see Medicaid patients do it as basically pro bono. Some figured out how to game the system with economies of scale but it’s nearly impossible do do and maintain a decent standard of care.
But Medi care was right with the commercial insurers on reimbursement.