However, what many people fail to understand is how the Medicare program also affected the treatment patterns of doctors and hospitals. Once seniors no longer had to pay for hospital stays, treatments became much more aggressive. Doctors began to prescribe more medical interventions — including unnecessary treatments, excess diagnostic testing, surgeries with little hope of success, etc. Overtime medical technology advanced due to this boost in funding. You could argue some of this added spending is good. But it’s also safe to say much of it is ineffective, unnecessary and (according to Dartmouth) unhealthy.