A horribly expensive part of Medicare is payment for ESRD. Dialysis costs about $1200 every time you walk into the clinic (more or less - my bill for March was $9600 but I was on the machine only twice weekly to save money). I finally got Medicare straightened out (I had to!! My private insurance insisted that BY LAW, after 30 months of [expensive] medical payments, they had to become secondary to Medicare and that they would only pay 20% of the cost of my care from now on). My Medicare “premium” is all of $120 a month, while my COBRA payments are $629 per month.
ESRD cost Medicare $28 billion last year for about 500K people including an unknown number of illegal aliens.
Medicare recipients receive three times the amount in benefits that they paid into the system thru taxes and benefits. The system is unsustainable.