In the USA, workers are taxed to pay for the Medicare system. The idea is that they are taxes while they are in their younger working years to help pay for their own medical expenses when they get older. If you want to get your medical care outside the Medicare system, you will not be getting any of your Medicare tax money back! You will have to pay the full ammount of the bill, and Medicare will not reimburse you or the hospital for any portion, despite the fact that you were taxed all of your working life. How much are the Taxes? Employers must withold 1.45% of the salaries of their workers, with the employer also paying an additional matching 1.45% of salaries paid. A self-employed individual must pay the entire 2.9% tax on self employed net earnings. Because of of the increasing burden on hospitals, the tax rate will soon be increased to 3.8% for higher incomes. The problem is that Medicare is setting unfunded mandates on hospitals, and implementing price fixing. Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985, hospitals are obligated to treat the uninsured without reimbursement, or they lose their eligibility to be reimbursed by Medicare. Government imposes viciously stiff fines and penalties on any physician and any hospital refusing to treat any patient that a zealous prosecutor deems an emergency patient, even though the hospital or physician screened and declared the patient's illness or injury non-emergency. But government pays neither hospital nor physician for treatments. In addition, this could potentially be used as a political weapon to discriminatorily punish non-compliant hospitals or doctors, even when they are not in violation of the law. When hospitals are forced to lose money on patients who do not pay, they have to raise prices on all the other patients to recuperate the losses. This includes liability costs. Even if the hospital was forced to treat such a patient, and that patient never paid, this patient can still sue the hospital for millions of dollars if a surgery goes wrong, or a rushed doctor seeing a long line of patients makes a misdiagnosis. The biggest potential problem with America's health system, that no one seem to be talking about, is that Medicare will not pay back a patient for their medical treatment if the patient pays more than a certain fixed amount for that medical treatment. Medicare will refuse to reimburse if the doctor charges the patient more than a certain predetermined price for the procedure. Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare reimbursements were cut again, and this automatically lowered the amount the doctor is allowed to charge the patient too, under a complex formula. http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/medicare-price-fixing-and-fraud/ http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/fix-medicare-not-its-prices Perhaps the reason many older patients cannot afford to pay out of pocket for their medical expenses is because they were taxed all those years to fund Medicare. The original idea behind Medicare taxes was that you would pay into the system which would pay back for your medical expenses when you got older. But now all sorts of strings have become attached to those payments. I see many similarities here between the school voucher program. The government makes you pay into a system, and then you have to obtain services through that system. When the government is controlling the funding, this gives the government more control. If you want to see a better more expensive doctor, or you want to send your children to a better private school, you are out of luck, and stuck paying for it all on your own, in addition to all those taxes you paid in to your good-for-nothing government.
