Mayo Clinic in Arizona to stop accepting Medicare patients

  In what could be another blow to Barack Obama’s healthcare reform bill, it was recently announced that the Mayo Clinic will no longer accept Medicare patients at a primary care clinic in Arizona. Medicare patients at the facility will have to pay cash if they want services. The reason– doctors can no longer afford to accept these patients, they lost $120 million on medicare patients last year alone . It is thought that other family practitioners will follow suit eventually.

  The senate version of the bill includes $500 billion in Medicare cuts, this can not bode well for a program that is already almost bankrupt– as we can see by the Mayo Clinic’s decision to stop treating some Medicare patients.

  The states (other than Nebraska) would be forced to pick up the additional costs of this already troubled program if they want to keep it intact. There are many problems with this bill and this decision by the Mayo Clinic just highlights one of the problems.

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

  That sounds a little bit like healthcare rationing to me. And it is only just beginning.