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Welcome to Our Future Under Obamacare: “Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients”

By Bronwyn's Harbor on January 2, 2010 at 8:45 AM in Current Affairs

* Bumped Up *

This is just the beginning. More and more clinics, large and small, and private practice doctors will drop more Medicare patients. Most small clinics already refuse Medicare and Medicaid patients, as I wrote about in “The Shortage of Physicians Who’ll Accept Patients with Government Plans” with updates and a foreword written by Larry Johnson. (More about my December 20th post below.)

Now, for the startling but not unexpected news story, “Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients,” from Bloomberg News, via The Drudge Report:

Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) — 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.

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.”

Medicare Loss

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.”

Read all.

What an unholy mess Obama has created through his obsession with getting in the history books as the second coming of FDR. That’s what this is all about, I hope you realize. The quality of the legislation is certainly not a priority. The viability of the Democratic majority in the House and Senate is also being risked. All for the self-glorification of The One as the president who created a federal health care plan. But at the most tremendous cost possible: Irretrievable harm to the current health system, which is already in peril, but will not be helped — at all — by Obamacare.

Here is the beginning of my December 20th post about a very real experience I encountered while lobbying to save the only clinic in my area that is willing to take Medicare and Medicaid patients since every other clinic in the area refuses these patients:

Fox News — especially commentator and columnist Charles Krauthammer — and a few other media outlets have pointed out that doctors cannot make ends meet if their patients are primarily on Medicare or Medicaid. A public health plan will add to the numbers of patients that physicians will not be eager to serve. From RealPolitics‘ “Some Inconvenient Truths About Medicare and the New ‘Public Plan’“:

The looming doctor shortage could become a national crisis as prospective physicians, whose education requires many to incur massive debt, would reluctantly opt for occupations where the government does not control their livelihoods.

My community faced the loss of its major health care clinic a few years ago, and its patients fought like crazy to get the county hospital to save the clinic. To make my case in a letter to the editor, I called every single general and family practitioner in a 50-mile radius, and asked each office if they were taking (1) new patients, (2) Medicare patients, or (3) Medicaid patients.

Guess what I found out: …

[Learn what I found out by clicking here.]

And don’t miss Larry Johnson’s common-sense foreword.

  • timmy

    LOL….. you can’t make this up…..?  Obamacare and the beginning of the end….!

  • miguel gutierrez

    Might as well open the hole on the Titanic a little more. Most empires rarely last 250yrs anyway. We will retake our land.

    The Fate of Empires
    by Sir John Glubb Pasha

  • Blue Heron

    We.ve only just begun…………………

  • donjo

    Strange about all this since one can get private company supplemental policies to cover charges beyond Medicare for less than a hundred $ a month.

  • tango

    Yes, but many retirees can barely afford Medicare premiums let alone supplemental policies.  Like my mother. Her only retirement income will be Social Security when she retires next year.  She never participated in any retirement savings programs. She doesn’t even have a months income in savings in case of an emergency. She spent all she made and figures both Social Security and Medicare will take care of her when she retires. Or her grown kids will make up the difference.

    I expect there’s lots of retirees or soon to be retired who are in the same situation as my mother.    (I hope this reply doesn’t post twice).

  • I’m a Linda too

    And they’ll do it.  When I lived in Phx, my employers actually carried them as my “health care plan” and they, even some 15….years ago had only specific Doctors you could see at the Clinic on the plan.  Then additional out of network Doctors.

    Sad, Glendale facility is on the west side…which is closer to Sun City Phoenix-the Adult Community with Seniors, as opposed to their Mesa or Scottsdale, NE Phx locations.

    But they will make the changes they need to.

  • tango

    Applicable Micheal Ramirez cartoon (click to enlarge it).

  • raging

    The cold hearted animals in Wash see this as fix for the economy – population control. By reducing number of baby boomers they’ve fixed social security and unemployment. stimulus funded high speed rail initiatives in the states are transportation to Century Village-like glue factories where Obama youth will work off college loans guiding seniors into the light. that’s for boomers lucky enough to hold on to private insurance till Medicare age.

  • donjo

    Part of the problem is that people misunderstand the purpose of Social Security.  It’s to provide a back up to private pension plans and savings and was NEVER intended to insure a comfortable retirement on its own.

    I don’t know why that has happened – all to often, it appears – but maybe SS should make it more clear that it isn’t a retirement plan.
    And unfortunately, it’s too late for many to make an adjustment to reality.

  • graywolf

    So her lack of planning and/or financial acumen becomes my problem?

  • Bronwyn

    Ouch.  That’s a bit harsh.  Perhaps she never had a high-income job with which to accrue a lot of savings.  Or she had several family crises that drew on her savings and earnings.  

    Do you even realize how much it costs to get decent coverage with Medicare?  The extra cost, per month, is at a minimum $400-500 for the supplemental policies and co-pays and all the drugs that aren’t covered by the Plan D.  Medicare is in no way a freebie — one pays through the nose for decent coverage.  And, if one doesn’t have the supplemental plans and needs to go to the hospital, the hospital will demand a $1,000 up-front payment to get in the doors.  Tom Delay’s drug plan is less than optimal, particularly if one needs prescriptions that aren’t generic.  First there are a number of drugs that simply aren’t covered by any Plan D insurance plan — it’s as if the drug ins. cos. have colluded to exclude certain drugs from any coverage at all.  Then there is the donut hole that hits most seniors around August or September of every year, and requires them to pay in full for their drugs– enormously expensive.  I could go on and on.  But the costs of Medicare — the right kind of Medicare that properly covers one’s heath care costs — is beyond the financial capabilities of most people.

  • Bronwyn

    And a good part of the problem is that the costs of medical care are so enormous (see my reply to Graywolf below) that, within a very short period of time, whatever one has managed to save can easily be gone through, especially if one hasn’t earned enough to be able to build a subtstantial nest egg or has had any number of financial/family crises that ruined one’s savings.

  • Bronwyn

    Test.  I have added Facebook to the list of sites that you can send out your comments to.  Will you all please try that out and make sure that Facebook is listed too?  To check it, please click on “Add another site” or on the “To” button.  If Facebook is listed for you, please let me know.  Thanks.

  • donjo

    My guess is that many, many people simply are counting on SS and Medicare to get them through retirement and that’s simply not enough.

      Your figures are a little bit high, but they can vary depending on how many prescritions are needed.  Here, the supplemental policies vary from around $50 to $100 per person per month. Prescription coverage is around $75 (plus $7.00 co-pay.)  In any case, it’s cheaper than private insurance.

  • tango

    My mother has made numerous bad choices throughout her life. She makes decent money now but has not saved anything. She’s the type who when she gets extra money,  she’d spend it on a trip verses using any of it to remodel her older home or even putting it in the bank or paying off her credit cards.  She already complains about the cost of her private medical coverage in relation to what she gets in return and feels she’ll pay the same for Medicare and get much better coverage. When we try to tell her that’s not necessarily true, she just shrugs it off or says she’ll just go bankrupt and who cares if she doesn’t pay her bills? 

    Food stamps, Social Seucrity, unemployment insurance, even medical insurance isn’t supposed to cover every bill. It’s assumed it will either be a supplement to another financial source (food stamps, social security) or take care of major expenses while you pay for minor expenses (health insurance). It’s assumed that people would have savings to withdraw from to help when they’re unemployed or retired or to pay for routine doctors visits/medicines. But so many complain when they’re expected to pony up the $100 for the doctors fee and pay for the antibiotic themselves. They want insurance to cover the major portion of the bill. And same with food stamps, TANF, unemployment insurance, social security. People complain it’s not enough to cover their bills – bills many times they willingly and stupidly assumed during good times. Such as buying a new car that cost almost twice their yearly income and running up credit cards. So of course, when hard times or retirement hits, they are unprepared. 

    I don’t feel it’s the governments responsibility to pay for my mothers bad choices.  My point is many retirees don’t have supplemental pensions or savings so can’t purchase additional insurance.

  • lark

    Cost of medical care is not the problem. It is rather that doctors and the medical profession is set on providing the services for some unknown right that they have and then asking for payment afterwards. In all other endeavors businesses makes an offer and consumers decide if they want to have them. If one has the opportunity to review cost prior to having the service and one has the opportunity to go to the next door down the hall and ask the next doctor what would she/he charge for the same service things would be very different.

  • Clara

    This ought to be taught in high school!  People rarelystay with one company for a career anymore and pensions provided by employers are a relic.  One must take care of himself and it’s very hard for young people or even struggling older adults to be disciplined enough to pay themselves first. 

  • SantaFeK

    I keep repeating this, so forgive me.  IN Santa Fe 10 years ago physicians were refusing to take medicare.  And now, there are quite a few.  I think this Mayo edict on their primary practice will give “permission” to lots of other doctors, e.g. that more will refuse.  Congratulations.  We have insurance.  Not too comforting if you are on medicare.

  • Kim

    I have often asked the cost of services and the people behind the desk at the doctor’s office or hospital looked at me like a deer in headlights.  Most of them time, they can’t even tell you the price of anything.  Then they say something like…”You have insurance, so don’t worry about it.”  It would be wonderful if all services had the price, kind of like the menu at a fast food restaurant.  Then maybe we’d get some real competition going and competetive pricing. 

  • creeper

    Oh, dear dog.   This makes my blood run cold.  mr. creeper is currently being seen at Mayo Rochester for a host of problems including an aneurysm (diagnosed by the VA but which they refused to repair), heart tumor and intractible lung infection, for which he will be on three different (and outrageously expensive) antibiotics for a year.   The bills already amount to tens of thousands of dollars, covered so far by Medicare and his supplemental, but they haven’t even begun to address the cardiac problems.  

    Will we soon find him cast out?  We’re already on our backup, VA coverage being his first line of medical care.  What happens if Mayo discontinues treating him?  Do we just go home and wait for him to die?

    Damn Barack Obama.  Damn the Democrats whose foolish pursuit of health care control leaves us in fear for our lives.  May they all know the cold knot of fear we live with every day.  

  • creeper

    Since I’m staring at Medicare coverage in one year, I’m having a hard time finding anything humorous about this. 

    Clearly, they have found a solution to the problem of boomers overloading the system–eliminate us.

    The Nazis were kinder.  At least their victims didn’t suffer long.

  • creeper

    Further…

    I now understand what I’ve been refusing to see for a decade.  Our government has declared war on its own citizens. 

    First it destroyed the futures of our children by shipping millions of jobs overseas.  Once the younger generations were totally consumed with the fight to simply survive, it moved on to the next phase.

    The next front in the war is seniors.  The plan seems to be two-fold.  It starts with transferring as much of our wealth to Washington and its cohorts as possible.  That’s what government bailouts, health care deform and Social Security cuts are about.  But it doesn’t stop there.  It ends with eliminating us as quickly and cheaply as possible. This is where Medicare cuts shine.

    Cap-and-trade is a two-fer.  It will rob both sets.  Watch for an even bigger push to pass it than we saw on health care.

    Insofar as the government is concerned, we are plainly their enemy.  What does that make them?

  • Lana

    We were talking about this at Christmas dinner. My sister-in-law has friends who moved to AZ specifically to be able to be seen at the Mayo Clinic regularly. They have already been told the clinic will not be accepting their Medicare.

  • Mila

    I am a physycian. I can tell you what the price of my service is, but I never see that much money. Insurance companies pay about a third of what I charge; madicare, madicaid pay even less, many patients do not pay at all. Do not forget that we already have limits to what we may ask you to pay. Neither limits nor lowered reimbursments exist in other insured fields. I agree that you should get an honest assessment of your costs up front, but you will have to talk to financial managers in your MD office about it, not the front desk clerk.

  • GlowingSpark

    “What an unholy mess Obama has created”. No changes to healthcare laws have occurred since Obama became President. Blaming this on him does not make any sense. 

  • cc

      edhardy  denim http://www.lookedhardy.com

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