One option for lowering Medicare costs has been to raise the copays that Medicare recipients must pay in order to receive treatment. However, a study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that raising copays led Medicare recipients to delay or skip treatments, which led them to require more expensive emergency and other hospital care.
See the full story in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/health/02aging.html?ref=health.
