Saturday, January 09, 2010

Mayo and Medicare - Washington's Shifting of Debt

I've got blog material stacking up so I''ll combine some potential blogs:

Mayo Clinic will no longer accept Medicare patients at one of its primary care clinics in Glendale, Arizona. Mayo said this is part of two-year pilot program to determine if it should drop other states with large populations of senior citizens, claiming it lost $840,000,000 treating Medicare patients last year. Governments lose staggering amounts like this and claim they don't have to change. Health care entities like Mayo are forced to change to prevent escalating costs of doing business; costs that they can't pass all on to their clientele.

ObamaCare plans to cut $500 billion in Medicare and the hospital industry agreed to chip in $1 billion a year over the next 10 years in lower annual payment increases for Medicare with an estimated 20% of hospitals becoming unprofitable as a result of this scheme. Obama praised Mayo last year as a "classic" example of how a health-care provider can offer "better outcomes" at lower costs.

Some example. Mostly because Obama and Congress don't want to give up political control over government health payments. Governments can't even control rampant fraud in the health care industry, estimated to be in the range of $100 billion a year.

ONE of the last things we need is a government run health care industry but that is what I'm afraid we are going to get.

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