Mayo Clinic in Arizona refuses to accept certain Medicare patients

From Bloomberg.com.

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.


The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said. Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said.
“We firmly believe that Medicare needs to be reformed,” Yardley said in a Dec. 23 e-mail. “It has been true for many years that Medicare payments no longer reflect the increasing cost of providing services for patients.”
Mayo will assess the financial effect of the decision in Glendale to drop Medicare patients “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona,” he said.

Nationwide, doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007, a payment gap that has remained stable during the last decade, according to a March report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a panel that advises Congress on Medicare issues. Congress last week postponed for two months a 21.5 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements for doctors.
Read the whole article here. The policy change only affects the Mayo clinic in Arizona, for now. Keep in mind, the decision to deny new Medicare patients comes before passage of Democrat plans to cut around $500 billion from Medicare.


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I have warned, with the new health care reform bill we will pay more and get less. This is a outrage.

The health care bill will not help all seniors.

But if you live in the states that got bribed by Harry Reid, such as Louisiana, Florida,Connecticut, Nebraska and a few others, then you might be ok.
 
The health care reform bill has passed the Senate, but not the House yet.  And there are problems already.

More doctors and hospitals will probably refuse to accept and see  Medicare patients, because they feel Medicare does not pay them enough. 

Just like medical pre-conditions were treated in the bill, the bill should have demanded, that people on Medicare cannot be refused. care and treatment.

This bill will allow the treatment for illegal immigrants, but it won't help its own senior citizens, or help you fully, if you are on Medicare.

Shame on the Senate. You get to keep your Cadillac insurance policy from the government group plan.  We have to settle for what is left. We always get the leftover.  Just like surfs.

What an outrage, what hypocrisy.  Many of these Senators do not care about the people who got them elected.  So now  many of the people who voted for these Senators,  will not care about them.