Negative Effects Of Medicare On Healthcare

Medicare changes the health care system by putting a cap on what physicians and other health care agencies are allowed to charge, setting guidelines and policies for health care reform, and by creating a base foundation for nationwide health care coverage. With the addition of prescription coverage in 1988 under the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, the government could monitor the cost of prescriptions, driving the cost to the consumer down. Medicare created a stimulus for research, new medical procedures, and technology. Open heart surgery facilities, cardiac intensive care units, and extended care facilities are directly attributed to the adoption of Medicare. It has also made hospitals more efficient by
Doctors and health care facilities must cut cost, oftentimes resulting in closers of said facilities. A major negative aspect is the effect on the federal deficit. There are often expansions to Medicare without any congressional action or approval on how or where the funds come from to pay for these expansions. Therefore, the cost of these expansions gets added to the federal deficit, which in turn drives up taxes and the cost of medical care to privately insured individuals. Fraud and abuse are another concerning negative. The government processes an estimated 1.2 billion Medicare claims each year by a computer often not catching a fraudulent claim. The Government Accountability Office estimates that Medicare makes about $17 billion improper payments each year, many due to fraudulent or erroneous overpayments. Types of fraud include: billing by health care providers for services not rendered, billing for procedures not delivered, misrepresenting services, unbundling services that would normally be billed as one service, billing for unnecessary services, duplicate billing, and falsifying cost reports resulting in increased payment to health care