Cleveland Clinic to cut $330 million from next year's budget, may cut jobs

About 60 percent of the hospital system’s costs are in labor, salaries and benefits, said spokeswoman Eileen Sheil, and “there’s only so much you can do with non-staff cost cutting.

“Healthcare reform has really changed things, and the burden of cost is going to be falling on patients,” she said. “We want to make sure we can keep care affordable....”

...Sheil said the Clinic has not been filling vacant positions in many departments for a while, and some departments may be able to meet their targeted cuts by attrition and non-staff cuts.

“Other places might have to look at reducing staff if they can’t make the targets without cutting in other areas,” she said.

The Clinic, which had about $6 billion in operating revenue last year, is the region’s largest employer with about 44,000 employees.

I have a very close relative who is a nurse. She was constantly screaming that obamacare will provide more tests earlier and that’s what is needed.

There is a breed of full of themselves nurses who've been screaming this for many years. I remember one time my wife, also a nurse, asking one of them, "How will diagnosing more cancer and more heart disease result in lower costs?" The smug response was early stage cancer and heart disease is much cheaper to treat than more advanced stages. I suppose that's true, but you know what's even cheaper than treating early stage heart disease? Death by heart attack from undiagnosed heart disease.

All these full of themselves, preachy, liberal nurses have to change their tunes now. Now they talk about unnecessary tests and cost effectiveness.

“To prepare for healthcare reform, Cleveland Clinic is transforming the way care is delivered to patients. …..
Although we have made progress, we need to further reduce costs to the organization by $330 million in 2014. We are carefully evaluating all aspects of our system to accomplish this. Some of the initiatives include offering early retirement to 3,000 eligible employees, reducing operational costs, stricter review of filling vacant positions, and lastly workforce reductions.

but...
but...
...but Obama says...
At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Aug. 11, 2009, Obama said, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."
In a speech to a joint session of Congress in September 2009, Obama said, "If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have."
The claim Obama made after the Supreme Court decision on June 28, 2012, was a broader statement, and as a result, it’s less accurate. First, a March 2012 study by the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan number-crunching arm of Congress, projected that 3 million to 5 million fewer non-elderly people would obtain coverage through their employer each year from 2019 through 2022 than would have been the case before the law was passed. Including those with individually purchased policies enlarges that decline by an additional 1 million to 3 million Americans.

I am just one cog in the wheel. My lab had 30 technologists reading slides for early detection of various types of cancer (specimens to include urines, bronchial washes and brushes, cerebrospinal fluids, needle aspirations from various body sites and pap smears). Already we are down to 22 techs now. I cannot imagine the devastation in the rest of the myriad medical laboratory specialties.

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