Mayo Clinic dropping Medicare patients
by Ed Morrissey
Barack Obama hailed the Mayo Clinic system as a model for health-care reform last summer — until Mayo opposed ObamaCare as a reform solution. They warned at the time that the bill passing through Congress would make Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements too low to pay for the costs of service and that providers would stop treating patients in those systems. Last week, that became a self-fulfilling prophecy
The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.Read more here. More here and here and here.
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.”
So. . . Looks like Gramma is out in the cold. That is, unless she is paying $900 or more a month for Insurance coverage from Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
