>>First - last year I spent a week in a hospital with pneumonia and medicare was billed $35K for that little visit.
I could have spent a week in the best hotel in Monte Carlo with hot and cold running blondes and spent less than medicare was billed.
To lay the blame for that on the elderly is to blame those who died from it for the bubonic plague.

Undeniably the $47T deficit came about because today's Medicare recipients preferred to accumulate private assets rather than paying enough extra tax to fund the scheme. Higher US medical costs don't help, but the deficit still is beyond recovery even at European single-payer pricing.

>>Second - if you go to an MD's office in the US you'll probably have to wait while the MD talks to a non-stop parade of pharma salespeople (mostly nubile young ladies) who call on the MD non-stop. Why are those MD's - who could be cranking out some serious billing with that time - spending time talking to them? Hmm.. I wonder why?

Figures show that >40% of a primary physician's time is spent on admin, mostly to satisfy payers. Unless you're saying the physician spent >65% of the remaining available time meeting nice young ladies, reducing admin needs to be the first topic.

>>I recently got a prescription for a med and the pharmacy called and told me that medicare wouldn't pay for it because the MD had not prescribed a generic which would have cost hundreds less. They got the MD to agree to a generic with the exact some active pharma ingredient and the price dropped hundreds of dollars to $9.
Investigations are underway into criminal collusion between MD's and pharmas and it smells bad, John.

Doctors have no control over pharma pricing and it seems unlikely the doctor got a back-hander for prescribing the expensive drug. Was it a handwritten prescription or was it printed out from an EHR? IME many US EHRS these days print both the brand and generic labels to avoid Medicare patients being disadvantaged in this fashion. Maybe you were misreported as having some other payer in which case that payer's rules would be applied. Any criminal investigation of physicians will find a series of high-profile ratbags, as usual, with everybody else just trying to get on with the practice of medicine.