Hold The Mayo
Have a peek at what's to come after health care "reform." The Mayo Clinic, praised by the president as a national model for efficient health care, is quite efficient. They like to get paid adequately for it, and they're seeing they do by turning away Medicare patients at one of its Arizona primary-care clinics. David Olmos writes for Bloomberg:
More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government's largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won't affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering "the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm." Mayo's move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.
"Many physicians have said, 'I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,'" said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. "If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn't make sense to do more of it."
what? Being a doctor... is a business? Who'da thunk it. Of course being a business makes them evil. Or something.
In this whole healthcare debacle, one thing I kept getting implicitly is that nobody on the government side actually knows how much anything costs. "Oh were just going to go in and cut what we reimburse them..." Yeah? And what crazy person in business would continue to go along with that?
SwissArmyD at January 1, 2010 1:05 PM
My Grandmother ran into the doctors limiting how many medicare patients they would take with almost all of them already at their set maximum. She finally found one, but he could retire at anytime.
The Former Banker at January 1, 2010 1:13 PM
1) The Obama plan is mostly about subsidizing private insurance, so what Medicare does isn't relevant.
2) Who says that what Medicare does is how this is going to work anyway. Kaus makes a good point here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/12/26/kf-spreads-the-germs-of-truth.aspx
Whatever at January 1, 2010 1:30 PM
I'm not sure how all this is going to work in the short-term, but here's another scenario I believe is more likely than the one presented by Kaus:
As soon as enough doctors stop accepting Medicare to inconvenience the system, the Secretary of HHS, acting on authority given her department in ObamaCare, orders doctors, under some draconian set of penalties, to accept all (or at least a certain percentage of their practice) Medicare patients. This new requirement will be spun as a win for consumers, and all the boomers hitting Medicare age will love it. A few of us will see it for what it is -- just another incremental loss of liberty on the long painful road to socialist nirvana.
cpabroker at January 1, 2010 5:33 PM
Hey Whatever, you want the government coming in and telling you you make too much money? First they came for the jews.....and before we knew it, we were all poor. And Dr-less.
momof4 at January 1, 2010 8:42 PM
cpabroker....word
momof4.....weird
kg at January 1, 2010 11:10 PM
Hey Whatever, you want the government coming in and telling you you make too much money? First they came for the jews.....and before we knew it, we were all poor. And Dr-less.
Most inscrutable blog comment ever. Having a little hair of the dog on New Year's day?
Whatever at January 2, 2010 2:56 AM
Ok, first they came for the bankers, and we said nothing. Then, they came for the Drs, and we said nothing. When they came to lower your pay, there was no one left to complain. Better? The gov't has no business telling anyone what they can make. I think it's fucking ridiculous that sports stars make so much money. But I don't want the gov't capping their pay, because I don't want them capping mine. And I don't want them jacking my taxes through the roof to pay for all this nonsense, making me poor.
I had no dog-hair or otherwise- new years eve. Yesterday is a different story. One parties when one has a sitter, when one has kids.
momof4 at January 2, 2010 7:34 AM
A lie. It's about destroying the private insurance industry so it requires a "bailout" - paving the way for universal single-payer with unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of your health care decisions.
The bill does. It defines the Medicare pay scale to be what will be paid. In other words, the government is not going to lower costs, but lower payments and make doctors operate below cost.
How many doctors you think are gonna stay in business and operate at a loss? How long you think that's sustainable?
Given that our government is made up of the worst and dimmest America has to offer, do you REALLY want them calling the shots on health care?
Think about that for a very long time. Because even if you love Barack Obama, there will eventually be a Republican in charge. Are you sure you'll like her decisions as much as you like Obama's?
brian at January 2, 2010 8:55 AM
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