Mayo Vs. Medicare and Medicaid

The Mayo Clinic is reducing services to Medicare and Medicaid patients due to goverment payment cuts.

The Heartland Institute reports:

The controversy over below-market government reimbursement rates has led the famed Mayo Clinic to close off access for many Medicare and Medicaid patients.

According to Mayo, Medicare was reimbursing doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona for only about 50 percent of the cost of the primary care treatment they were providing, leading Mayo to make the decision to opt out of Medicare.

The clinic will continue to accept Medicare patients at the facility for primary care treatment, but only if they pay cash.

Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, noted this natural consequence:

Ridenour says the situation will only worsen if President Obama's health care law is not repealed.

"It is so difficult for Medicaid recipients to find doctors that Medicaid enrollees already have been utilizing emergency room care at twice the rate of uninsured patients," she said. "We can expect it to be increasingly difficult for Medicaid and Medicare patients to find doctors and other providers."

This shunting of patients into the ER for non-emergency problems was one of the problems that "universal health care" was supposed to eliminate.

What additional failures of ObamaCare will we see soon?