I work in a hospital...specifically in dialysis. Medicare reimburses us for most of our patients...at 65% of
our cost. Read that again...they reimburse for just over half what it
costs us to treat a patient. That isn't half of the normal charge...it means that we must charge our few insurance patients...and I do mean
FEW...a price inflated enough to pay for at least 45% of the
cost of 85 - 90% of our treatments. And dialysis is one area where Medicare reimbursement are actually pretty high...
But to round out the whole equation, Medicare's requirements are a major source of the high cost of care. For example, my unit had done a
quarterly sanitization of our water system for years...and never had either bad test results indicating bio-growth in the system, nor had found any growth when replacing sections of pipe during repairs. Yet we were forced to begin
monthly sanitizations thanks to Medicare...at a cost of $2000 a
month. This was not a requirement that was needed for patient safety or for any other reason, it was simply something Medicare decided to do because a few units nation-wide had growth problems.
In a like manner, my hospital has recently been notified that we
must replace the units that sanitize all our scopes (endo, gastro, etc.) Why? Well, not because the older unit has ever had any problems, nor because the older unit has ever shown to be inadequate to sanitize...it is purely and simply because the FDA has ordered the manufacturer to stop supporting the older units because they have an updated unit receiving 510K clearance. They had initially given the manufacturer 6 months to stop supporting the units, but have now given them an extra year... thanks to pressure from the American Hospital Association (which recognizes that the cost of the new unit could literally bankrupt smaller hospitals in today's economy).
This is what infuriates me the MOST about ObamaCare...the government points at the high cost of healthcare as a reason for the takeover, but
the government is one of the main sources of high cost. 
Just as much as the high cost due to law suits, the government regulations and red tape...for drug companies, equipment manufacturers, and providers...add a huge amount of expense to every single bill. Insurance companies are the
only thing keeping our healthcare system intact at this time. When Obamacare kills them, our entire system will go under.
