Glendale, AZ Mayo Clinic Stops Taking Medicare

Patterico – Glendale Mayo Clinic Won’t Accept Medicare:

“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.”

Yet part of the plan for ObamaCare is to reduce Medicare expenditures. With lower payments and more people on that plan the reasonable prediction is that fewer doctors will take government insurance. It’ll be universal health insurance, except that doctors won’t universally take it.

Is that unexpected? Hardly. That’s exactly what happened in the French experience with universal health insurance:

A couple of things you can learn if you’re in France:

First, the meaning of “universal.” It doesn’t mean what you think if you’re a poor person in France, where “universal” health care is arguably better than elsewhere in the EU. It means about 75 percent. Le Parisien reports this morning that, as in the U.S., the more money you have the better care you get. Shocking. The paper backed up a recent study with a small-scale sting of their own and discovered that if you rely on France’s medical insurance alone, 25 percent of French doctors will refuse to treat you. That’s how you say ObamaCare in French.

Previously – Are Medicare cuts being subsidized by private health care?