The train wreck that is Obamacare just added another stop on its route. Bloomberg is reporting on a Mayo Clinic announcement that the medical care provider will drop thousands of Medicare patients from its Glendale Arizona clinic.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.”
The article goes on to explain that the Mayo’s nationwide operation lost $840 million in 2008 treating Medicare patients. All this before Obamacare takes hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare funding.
The point is not that Medicare is underfunded per se, but rather that government intervention into the insurance and medical care markets has been disastrous. As each year passes, the magnitude of that disaster increases. Obama’s health care overhaul will accelerate the process exponentially.
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2 comments:
you might feel differently about healthcare if we didn't pay you so much that you can afford it. When's the last time you were poor? When's the last time that you were friends with a poor person?
"Woe to you who are rich!"
Peace.
Dear Rob,
Please read carefully--this is what liberals fail to understand about conservatives: I am all in favor of making health insurance available to poor people. If I thought Obamacare would actually accomplish that objective without hurting more people than it will help, I would be for it.
Have you actually read how Obamacare is going to be paid for? For starters they are going to cut $400 Billion from Medicare. Of more than 2700 nursing homes in the country, a majority are in danger of bankruptcy. Taking $400 Billion from medicare could cause many of them to close.
If you are 30, 40, or 50 years old and you lose your health insurance because you lose your job, you at least have a chance of getting another job and health coverage with it. But if you are 70 and you need a medical procedure to live and you can't get it because of medicare cuts, or you are 80 or 90 and in a nursing home, and it closes because of medicare cuts, you are helpless. Yet, this is where the Democrats want to make cuts to pay for Obamacare.
And what will happen when the cost of government-run healthcare exceeds what the federal budget can afford? There will be rationing of benefits. Look at England. Look at Canada.
On the whole, everyone is better off leaving health insurance in the private sector and relying on Medicaid and state-run programs like Badgercare, which we have in Wisconsin (or Tenncare which we had in Tennessee), to take care of low income individuals and the temporarily unemployed.
The private healthcare system we have in the United States is the engine that drives innovation in medical procedures and pharmaceuticals, and the whole world benefits from it. If we destroy that engine by nationalizing healthcare in the US, we stand not only to diminish the quality of healthcare in this country but in the entire world.
Oh, and by the way, Rob, unless you are a homeless person who sent your message from a public access computer in a public library, you are probably in the same economic bracket that I am. So woe to you too!
Peace!
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