Blog to media: Arizona clinic isn't first Mayo site to stop taking Medicare

Commentary by Kay B. Day

Medicare notice on Mayo Jacksonville page. [Screen snip]Mayo Clinic announced it would stop taking Medicare at an Arizona clinic and media seized this as news. Here’s a blog flash for you: the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville hasn’t accepted Medicare Pt. B for quite some time. And having Medicare Advantage won’t help.

President Barack Obama praised Mayo as a beacon on the healthcare hill.

But hospital systems don’t have the option the federal government has, that of fabricating paper money.

The Wall Street Journal noted: “Mayo says it lost $840 million last year treating Medicare patients, the result of the program's low reimbursement rates. Its hospital and four clinics in Arizona—including the Glendale facility—lost $120 million. Providers like Mayo swallow some of these Medicare losses, while also shifting the cost by charging more to private patients and insurers.”

Repeat the underlined clause in that last sentence.

By the by, Mayo in Jacksonville doesn’t take Medicaid either.

This is just another stone on a rocky path the Democrats have erroneously called healthcare reform.

Those who participated (with help from union organizations) in crafting healthcare legislation should admit the likely outcomes:

1. Middle class Americans who are privately insured will pay more.

2. More facilities will wise up and ditch Medicare and/or Medicaid.

3. As boomers age, rationing will be necessary. We already have a shortage of primary care physicians in some areas.

4. If either the House or Senate bill passes, this will be a boon to amnesty advocates who want people in the country illegally to have a path to citizenship (whether they really want to be citizens or not). If a public option or new entitlement is in place, those granted amnesty would qualify as they did the last time the U.S. passed an amnesty bill.

5. There are few outcomes we can pinpoint as definite. These bills were crafted without the transparency Obama promised. Most in Congress have no idea what's really in these bills. They haven't read them.

At the moment, the U.S. healthcare system operates as one of the largest de facto charities in the world. The government is desperate to increase revenue for its own healthcare initiatives like Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP.

 Ask yourself what it might have been like had the government not removed that sizable market share from the marketplace and had simply kept one entitlement program, Medicaid, for those who truly could not afford care.

Democrats like to rail about the GOP passing the Medicare Prescription Act without paying for it. Yet the Democrats paid for their SCHIP expansion by taxing cigarettes even more although the number of smokers is declining. Ask your nearest governor how he plans to continue funding a program that expanded exponentially in its infancy. As an aside, ask yourself why they're not taxing repeat DUI offenders, drug abusers and alcoholics.

And ask yourself how a Democrat can rail against the Medicare Prescription Act that helped every retiree in the land who is on Medicare but at the same time want to create another government entitlement program that by many estimates will help less than 30 million people in the country. I say ‘people in the country’ because the government cannot guarantee medical care will not be provided to those here illegally.

Think about it. Who is paying medical bills for all those “citizen terrorists” we’re trying in federal courts?

Mayo’s decision on Medicare in Arizona is neither new nor unprecedented. It is likely other medical providers will follow suit.