Balance billing

This really is the kind of thing you should be calling your reps about:

Tom Price wants to “reform” Medicare by allowing “balance billing” of Medicare-eligible patients by doctors without requiring them to exit the Medicare program entirely, the practical effect of which, as Ryan Cooper, writing for The Week explains, would “[allow] doctors and hospitals to devour the nest eggs of thousands of American seniors:”

Permanently obliterating the financial security of helpless families with no or bad insurance as a loved one dies slowly and painfully of a chronic illness is a nice little profit center for providers. But it pales in comparison to the gravy train they might get if they can bring balance billing to Medicare.

Physicians For a National Health Care Program describes the practical implications of the Price proposal:

Even though we often hear threats that physicians will stop seeing Medicare patients, most really can’t afford to give up their Medicare revenues, and, besides, too many Medicare beneficiaries do not have adequate resources to pay large medical bills in full. The current law provides leverage to ensure that physicians will be there when Medicare patients need them.

The [Price] legislation would no longer require physicians to exit the Medicare program entirely should they enter agreements to independently bill the patients for the balance of their fees. Also Medicare would still have to pay the allowed charges. As a further insult, the physician can require the patient to do their own Medicare billing. The physician gets the full fee, in cash, including the disallowed charges, and the patient has to do the paperwork.

PNHP also notes there would be no limit on prices medical providers choose to “negotiate” with otherwise Medicare-eligible patients under the Price plan.

Cooper observes that 55 million Seniors, many with significant retirement savings, provide a perfect target for medical providers to exploit.  In 2011, Tom Price, Trump’s now-designated overseer of Medicare introduced a “Medicare reform” package designed to do just that.  It received the AMA’s imprimatur of approval, since it allowed physicians to require their patients to pay the full balance of their unrestricted fees, even if far in excess of Medicare allowable charges, thus benefitting the physicians and providers that organization represents.

In 2011 we had a President Obama to assure such a plan to bankrupt Seniors through onerous medical bills would go nowhere. And many physicians, even some within the ranks of the AMA, are vehemently opposed to it.