I had an appt. a few days ago and I had been used to paying $75.00 for an office call, my former employer's insurance plan pays nothing on office calls. Since I am new to medicare, my deductible hadn't been met yet, so I had to pay the max that medicare would have paid, that number was $63.99. After my deductible is met I will be paying 20% of that figure.
A difference of $11.00 in what my doc gets is not a lot but she did say she has lots of medicare patients.
It a fairly big operation with 4 docs working there plus nurses, a nurse practitioner and various staff - lots of overhead. I'm sure that accepting medicare patients is factored in to the fee structure, in other words, younger patients are picking up the slack caused by us old coots. Don't jump on me about it, I didn't invent the social security/ medicare/ medicaid monstrosity, nor do I participate willingly.
I have a private pension plus social security, plus 401k that I alone paid into and converted upon retirement, my wife still works and gets a very healthy pay check.
My former employer requires me to be on medicare or I lose all my retirement benefits from them, including insurance and besides, everyone get back to me if you reach s.s. age and want to retire and you refuse to accept that check or don't accept medicare.
It simply an awful, socialist system that I was forced to pay into all my working life and needs to be scuttled.
Like I see so many others say on this forum, just give me back all the money I paid in over the years (forget about interest), and many of those years I paid the max and I will consider signing off on ever getting any more ss benefits.
...ah, you might reread your benefits book... your ER can NOT require you to be in medicare and threaten a retirement plan unless it is some unqualified exec benefit arrangement. Your pension/401k is YOURS at Retirement age and cannot be tied to a medical coverage. They can change any promised retirement medical if you don’t follow the medical rules, but that is separate and apart from a pension plan... anything else is in violation of federal law....?
ymmv