Mayo Clinic to Stop Accepting Medicare Patients

[MacUser]

Mayo Clinic to Stop Accepting Medicare Patients
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... oYSI84VdL0


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.

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Absolutely... Shameful, Terrible, to Unthinkable, to go after the aging Americans that passed a working, growing, viable America onto it's kids... only to have it all changed on them at the last minute when they are going to need it.

Is this the Change America voted for?

[Phil Hoover]

that clinic is also a BUSINESS....if the only people who use that particular clinic are MEDICARE patients, then it probably cannot afford to keep its doors open.

MEDICARE has never paid the full amount for the services....every medical facility loses with the MEDICARE system.

[MacUser]

that clinic is also a BUSINESS....if the only people who use that particular clinic are MEDICARE patients, then it probably cannot afford to keep its doors open.

MEDICARE has never paid the full amount for the services....every medical facility loses with the MEDICARE system.

Sure Phil.. absolutely agreed. My broader point is that with Obama's new health care bill cuts this MORE ( immediately and up front - thus reason Mayo is rejecting and sending a STRONG message ).. these retiring hard working individuals are the targets for Obama's revamped way of saving costs. This HC plan is flawed and should be rejected on this premise alone.

If something is cut.. it shouldn't be from these hard working individuals. If you want to control costs.. open it to competition across state lines. Then go after the law breakers instead of honest retiring Americans.

[Full Quiver]

BRAVO!