Re: Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients

On 12/31/2009 5:00 PM, Bob wrote:
> Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients
>
> By David Olmos
>
> 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.
>
> “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.”
>
> Medicare Loss
>
> The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated
> 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the
> government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo
> spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.
>
> 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.
>
> “We firmly believe that Medicare needs to be reformed,” Yardley said in a
> Dec. 23 e-mail. “It has been true for many years that Medicare payments no
> longer reflect the increasing cost of providing services for patients.”
>
> Mayo will assess the financial effect of the decision in Glendale to drop
> Medicare patients “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona,” he
> said.
>
> Nationwide, doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare
> patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007, a
> payment gap that has remained stable during the last decade, according to a
> March report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a panel that
> advises Congress on Medicare issues. Congress last week postponed for two
> months a 21.5 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements for doctors.
>
> National Participation
>
> Medicare covered an estimated 45 million Americans at the end of 2008,
> according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency in
> charge of the programs. While 92 percent of U.S. family doctors participate
> in Medicare, only 73 percent of those are accepting new patients under the
> program, said Heim of the national physicians’ group, citing surveys by the
> Leawood, Kansas-based organization.
>
> Greater access to primary care is a goal of the broad overhaul supported by
> Obama that would provide health insurance to about 31 million more
> Americans. More family doctors are needed to help reduce medical costs by
> encouraging prevention and early treatment, Obama said in a June 15 speech
> to the American Medical Association meeting in Chicago.
>
> Reid Cherlin, a White House spokesman for health care, declined comment on
> Mayo’s decision to drop Medicare primary care patients at its Glendale
> clinic.
>
> Medicare Costs
>
> Mayo’s Medicare losses in Arizona may be worse than typical for doctors
> across the U.S., Heim said. Physician costs vary depending on business
> expenses such as office rent and payroll. “It is very common that we hear
> that Medicare is below costs or barely covering costs,” Heim said.
>
> Mayo will continue to accept Medicare as payment for laboratory services and
> specialist care such as cardiology and neurology, Yardley said.
>
> Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center in
> Washington, D.C., said physicians’ claims of inadequate reimbursement are
> overstated. Rather, the program faces a lack of medical providers because
> not enough new doctors are becoming family doctors, internists and
> pediatricians who oversee patients’ primary care.
>
> “Some primary care doctors don’t have to see Medicare patients because there
> is an unlimited demand for their services,” Berenson said. When patients
> with private insurance can be treated at 50 percent to 100 percent higher
> fees, “then Medicare does indeed look like a poor payer,” he said.
>
> Annual Costs
>
> A Medicare patient who chooses to stay at Mayo’s Glendale clinic will pay
> about $1,500 a year for an annual physical and three other doctor visits,
> according to an October letter from the facility. Each patient also will be
> assessed a $250 annual administrative fee, according to the letter. Medicare
> patients at the Glendale clinic won’t be allowed to switch to a primary care
> doctor at another Mayo facility.
>
> A few hundred of the clinic’s Medicare patients have decided to pay cash to
> continue seeing their primary care doctors, Yardley said. Mayo is helping
> other patients find new physicians who will accept Medicare.
>
> “We’ve had many patients call us and express their unhappiness,” he said.
> “It’s not been a pleasant experience.”
>
> Mayo’s decision may herald similar moves by other Phoenix- area doctors who
> cite inadequate Medicare fees as a reason to curtail treatment of the
> elderly, said John Rivers, chief executive of the Phoenix-based Arizona
> Hospital and Healthcare Association.
>
> “We’ve got doctors who are saying we are not going to deal with Medicare
> patients in the hospital” because they consider the fees too low, Rivers
> said. “Or they are saying we are not going to take new ones in our
> practice.”

What’s more is that half the people that have no insurance, they qualify
for Medicade when they get sick and go to the hospital.

So Democrats numbers of ~30 million w/o insurance is wrong, half of them
already could be covered by Medicade. The NEW health insurance laws
will still leave some 15 million w/o coverage.

That means that for a cost of only $2trillion dollars, we bought *NOTHING*