Mayo Clinic Loses Millions Because of Medicare

The Anchorage Daily News has a very interesting editorial that reveals that the celebrated Mayo Clinic has lost millions because of Medicare over the last year.

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In its editorial the ADN is warning that the public option is “as unhealthy as Medicare” because of the artificially low payments the government remits to healthcare providers, doctors and hospitals. President Obama and the left love to point to the Mayo Clinic as one of America’s premier medical institutions and rightfully so. But the ADN reveals that the clinic lost $840 million on it’s $1.7 billion worth of Medicare work. ADN notes that the loses that doctors and hospitals are being hit with because the government refuses to pay market prices for services to patients, many doctors and hospitals are limiting new patients on Medicare. Obama’s plans for a “public option” is supposed to “fix” the fact that doctors are limiting Medicare patients, but ADN shows that the policy will make matters worse.

A government-run “public plan” would make this dilemma worse rather than better. Current proposals for a “public plan” would place unsustainable financial pressure on doctors and hospitals. Some of the proposals suggest paying providers rates close to that which Medicare currently uses to underpay health care providers. Others suggest “negotiated” payments, but the pressure to suppress provider payments would be hard to resist. Either way, the current problematic situation for patient access to care could well become a crisis.

In other words, the claim that Obamacare would improve and enlarge medical services is simply a chimerical fantasy. The only outcome will be rationing in order not to overload the delicate system. And who will be cut off from medical care first? The elderly. Why? Because they use it the most. Ergo, Obamacare will cut off our elderly and will begin to deny them services from coast to coast.

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