Sorry dog, but I've read tons of my dad's medicare reimbursement statements. Doctors don't make any profit on medicare patients. If all they had were medicare patients, they couldn't keep their practices open, let alone make a living.
From my personal experience, it's not so much the docs, it's the hospitals and specialist associations that make the money. They buy expensive machines, MRI, CAT scans, etc and need to keep them humming. If they can get enough unnecessary tests they can pay for the machine in only a year or two.
This is a Time magazine article on medical costs. It is 42 pages long, but worth reading for anyone discussing Medicare/Medicaid.
http://www.uta.edu/faculty/story/2311/Misc/2013,2,26,MedicalCostsDemandAndGreed.pdf
Random out-of-context quotes from the article are listed below. The costs are for people without insurance.
Bedside xray: Patient was charged $333. The national rate paid by Medicare is $23.83
$7 each for “alcohol prep pad.” This is a little square of cotton used to apply alcohol to an injection. A box of 200 can be bought online for $1.91.
Patient was charged $18 each for Accu-chek diabetes test strips. Amazon sells boxes of 50 for about $27, or 55¢ each. (Note: I bought them for 20 cents each)
Patient was charged $6,538 for three CT scans. Medicare would have paid a total of about $825 for all three
Niacin Tablet: Patient was charged $24 per 500-mg tablet of niacin. In drugstores, the pills go for about a nickel each
… Sloan-Kettering is billing more than $1,200 an hour for that nurse....
“One of the benefits attending physicians get from many hospitals is the opportunity to cruise the halls and go into a Medicare patient’s room and rack up a few dollars,” says a doctor who has worked at several hospitals across the country. “In some places it’s a Monday-morning tradition. You go see the people who came in over the weekend. There’s always an ostensible reason, but there’s also a lot of abuse.”
Jonathan Blum: ‘When hospitals say they are losing money on Medicare, my reaction is that Central Florida is overflowing with Medicare patients and all those hospitals are expanding and advertising for Medicare patients,’ says Blum, deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. ‘Hospitals don’t lose money when they serve Medicare patients.’