December 31, 2009

Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients

By barb-caldeira

The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.

 

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.” Mayo’s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.

 

“Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,’” said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. “If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”

 

Bloomberg.com, by David Olmos, 12-31-09

 

Additional coverage:

Arizona Republic

Seattle PI

Canada Free Press

Washington Times

Smart About Health

Top News

High Desert Perspective

Ozarks First

Examiner.com

PoliGazette

First Things

Lincoln Star Journal

Finance & Commerce

BusinessWeek

 

 

 

Tags: Health Policy, Mayo Clinic Arizona, Medicare

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