Meet Our Future Under Obamacare: Arizona Mayo Clinic to Stop Treating Medicare Patients … What Say You Magic 8 Ball?

Who says that we cannot get visions of what the future has in store? We just need to ask the Magic 8 Ball if Obamacare will destroy health care in the United States.

Will Obamacare destroy healthcare and private insurance in US?

It is Certain!

Get ready America, it is a flash forward of what is in store when Obamacare becomes law and all Americans are affected by this terrible piece of health care legislation. The Mayo Clinic in Arizona will stop seeing some Medicare patients because the reimbursement rate is too low. Yes, the Mayo Clinic is the very one that Obama praised of a model for efficient health care. The interesting thing about providing and quality and efficient service though, is one must be paid an acceptable rate.

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.

So what does America and seniors think is going to happen when Democrats and Obamacare strips billions of dollars out of Medicare? There is a reason why so many people are against Obamacare.

“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.”

As stated at The Astute Blogger, Socialism never works. There is a reason why the Medicare/Medicaid system is broke and the answer is not to make there be more government control over health care. So what is Obama’s answer to a flawed Medicare reimbursement system that already pays physicians too little, cut back on the fee for service even more.

Over at Naked Capitalism, Dr RX is referencing some CMS regs that are correct. If you are a participating Medicare provider you cannot just cheery pick patients and services and provide some services for cash payment if they are covered by Medicare. They would have to opt out for being a participating provider.

However, what will happen beyond a shadow of a doubt if Obamacare passes is that the individuals that are forced into Medicaid will have no doctors. If physicians bolt from Medicare because of low rates, imagine what they will do with the influx of Medicaid patients. Who could afford to pay the bills if suddenly 70% of your patients are CAID and a doctor gets paid $18 a visit?

3 Responses to “Meet Our Future Under Obamacare: Arizona Mayo Clinic to Stop Treating Medicare Patients … What Say You Magic 8 Ball?”

1. john on January 1st, 2010 5:53 pm

   At least the poor, lazy, jackass down the street
   can smoke weed all day and get free care now.

2. St Stephen on January 1st, 2010 11:35 pm

   Healthcare reform seems to translate into less care, more cost…and jail time if you do not subscribe to mandate without choice healthcare.

   What a plum for insurance companies!

   Change you better believe in…or else.

3. katablog.com on January 2nd, 2010 12:46 am

   I say we are screwed.

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