> If you serve a certain rate of medicare patients, you get additional funding. It's set up this way for 'political' reasons. Like most of us politics, it's a mess.

That's not an incentive for hospitals to serve Medicare patients; it's compensation for the fact that the hospital sees so many Medicare patients (and therefore so few privately-insured patients, by portion) that it can't make up the difference solely from overcharging private insurers.