“If you don’t have funds to pay for your own health care, you will be signed up for Medicaid and the government (we) will pay.”
Not exactly.
Medicare/Medicaid doesn’t cover all the costs, rather they cover a fraction.
They force healthcare providers to make up the difference by raising the prices on everyone else
If this becomes difficult or impossible, they refuse to take medicare/medicaid patients.
It’s an abomination, and doesn’t work, and actually does need to be “fixed”
Fraction is not an accurate description. It is true they don’t pay adequately, but they do pay close to what insurance companies do.
The government has DRGs and those are covered in a sub par manner, but referencing it as “a fraction” is misleading.
They’re not paying dimes on the dollar.
In the old days you could make the case the insurance companies picked up some of the slack, but back into the 90s they also developed a DRG model and refused to pay more than X for any given malady.
Hospitals were viewed as the “oil companies” of health care by the public. In fact they are getting by on very slim margins, and being asked to do more than ever.
Some have been pushing back, but you can’t refuse service if service is what you provide for income.
At some point you just close your doors.
This is a rude reality Trump will probably not run into since he won’t be covering more people like he thought he would.