Health Care Quake: Mayo Dropping Medicare
The Mayo and Gonda buildings of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Insider Online and Jeff Jacoby point to an interesting development from the Mayo Clinic concerning Medicare and Washington’s push for socialized health care.
Though President Barack Obama praised the Mayo Clinic last year as a model medical facility, the Mayo has just decided not to accept Medicare patients anymore. The Mayo lost $124 million in Arizona and $840 million nationwide.
Says Jacoby:
Why would an institution renowned for providing health care of “the best quality and the lowest cost’’ choose to sever its ties with the government’s flagship single-payer insurance program? Because the relationship is one it can’t afford. Last year, the Mayo Clinic lost $840 million on its Medicare patients. At the Glendale clinic, a Mayo spokesman told Bloomberg News, Medicare reimbursements covered only 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients. Not even the leanest, most efficient medical organization can keep doing business with a program that compels it to eat half its costs.
In breaking away from Medicare, the Mayo Clinic is hardly blazing a trail. In 2008, the independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reported that 29 percent of Medicare beneficiaries – more than 1 in 4 – have trouble finding a primary-care doctor willing to treat them. A survey by the Texas Medical Association that year found that only 38 percent of the state’s primary-care physicians were accepting new Medicare patients.
You may recall that the socialists in Washington want to slash Medicare to try and pay for their new government health care system. This move by the Mayo illustrates that the Medicare system is already in trouble for being so on-the-cheap that the medical industry can’t make the bottom line on it. How much worse will it be after the Potomac meddlers are done?
But then, they probably knew that. It would be in keeping with their modus operandi to have intentionally worked to make things worse, knowing that the ensuing discomfort and chaos may serve as a springboard for them to justify even more radically socializing our health care system.
If our “representatives” in Washington had any real concern for making things better, they’d scrap this monstrosity of a bill and start from scratch on a free-market model that increases competition and consumer involvement in health care.
Don’t bet on that, though; these jokers are too entrenched in Marxist philosophy to ever go for something like that.
This will be just one more mess conservatives will have to clean up next year when we take back Congress.
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