by Jason Stotts
Bloomberg is reporting that as of January first, one of the Mayo Clinics in Arizona has decided to stop accepting Medicare patients. This is the right decision for the Clinic because, as they note, medicare patients do not pay enough to warrant treatment. That is, the Mayo Clinic is losing too much money to Medicare and they want to stop the bleeding. In 2008, the Mayo organization as a whole lost $840M to Medicare. The situation in Arizona was even worse than the national average:
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. [Emphasis mine]
That’s right. Medicare is only covering half of the cost of treating the patients in Arizona. Half. Arizona can’t even be the worst case because the Mayo website notes that they only have locations in three states. Since they only lost about 15% of their total losses in Arizona, I can’t even imagine how poorly the other locations are doing.
What makes the decision for the Mayo clinic to stop treating Medicare patients the best is that they are held up as the example of, in Obama’s words: “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm” and as a model for efficient healthcare in the US. I would like to think that this will make comrade Obama reconsider his plan to socialize medicine in the US; however, given that his plan seems to have no reference to reality, I doubt this will even make him pause.
The article goes on to note that many primary care physicians are also choosing not to accept new Medicare patients, as it is a bad financial decision for them to do so. This, of course, limits their access to care and requires them to go to doctors who may not be as good or who will spend very little time on them. This, again, demonstrates the principle that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always has to foot the bill. Unfortunately, if you let the government do so, then you give control of your life to a faceless bureaucrat.