| > Midicare is often providing a disproportionate amount of funding relative to the amount of care being provided. In other words Medicare may be 70% of the fund but < 70% of the costs. Except that's not the case. Medicare's standard reimbursements are significantly less than COGS, and that doesn't even account for overhead. This is pretty obvious to demonstrate, because other payers are generally required by law to set their reimbursement rates above what Medicare offers for their services. So there's mathematically no way that Medicare could be providing a disproportionate share of fee-for-service reimbursements. And I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the link you provided. FORHP is distinct from the critical access stipends that Medicare provides, which is what's relevant here (even though critical access hospitals may also receive funding through FORHP programs). > But, that's frequently not enough to keep the doors open so the government added some back doors to hand out funding without strings attached. There are plenty of strings attached. One of those strings is that the hospital's payer mix must exceed a certain threshold of Medicare patients. Again, that's not accidental - the whole point is that hospitals who don't exceed this threshold of Medicare patients will use their privately-insured patients to subsidize the costs of care for Medicare patients. |
Many people receive services then pay 0$.
And really that's the core problem. A hospital can send a clam to collections but collections agency's pay penny's on the dollar. And if someone dies in debt there is nobody to collect anything from by law unless someone is dumb enough to voluntarily takes on that debt.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_coverage_in_t...