This isn't the first article I've seen on this and they all seem to imply that something unscrupulous is going on because some doctors make so much from medicar

This isn't the first article I've seen on this and they all seem to imply that something unscrupulous is going on because some doctors make so much from medicare. In some cases there probably is but is data on total payments received alone enough to tell people anything meaningful? I would think you would also need to know what their percentage of elderly patients were vs. private insurance patients. You would also need some measure of their operating costs. Absent that kind of information this seems only useful as a political tool to plant the idea in people's minds that hey these doctors make a lot of money and some of it might be fraudulent.