What the new health care reform did is very little except raise costs and reduce payments to hospitals who lose money on every Medicaid, Medicare, and self-pay patient. When I say lose money, I don't mean lose profit, I mean not even meeting 50% of the cost of treating the patient.

When your mix of those 3 categories is 75% of your case mix, or more, then you are losing money on 75% of your patients, and the 25% that are left have to make up the difference just to keep the doors open.

It doesn't help when you have a provider like Toni dealt with, because that provider not only provided bad service, but hospitalized a patient that didn't need to be, took up a bed and other resources that are now not free to treat another patient, and in general increased the cost of overhead for the hospital. Medicare will most likely deny payment for the majority of the tests, and the hospital will have to eat that cost, all because the provider couldn't be bothered to provide decent service to her patient.