Posted on 04/03/2013 4:02:28 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.
Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially.
Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.
“If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. “The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now.”
After an emergency meeting Tuesday, Vacirca’s clinics decided that they would no longer see one-third of their 16,000 Medicare patients....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
“to deny cancer treatments *JUST* because of money makes my blood boil.”
do you advocate increasing taxes to pay for cancer treatments or borrowing from the future or cutting spending
please don’t say cut waste and abuse.
Sure, In the words of that famous Surgeon General. They would jus probably die of something or the other anyway.
You really want to align yourself with this moron?
Get a head start, exit now. Take some of your humanist/libertarian friends with you, heck throw an exit party.
If that doesn’t work then try 80 to 95, then shucks 60 to 70, and when the kids get in charge 30 might seem reasonable.
That would be a good start. If we are willing to deny care why not just start up the Soylent green rooms.
I had my Chemo Treatment at my Oncologist’s Office.
My 90 Year Old Father has the same Oncologist (for Lymphoma)and he just sent him in for a CAT Scan.
I have read that Medicare will start to cut back on funding Radiology Testing for Patients over 75. Could just be hearsay, but I am starting to wonder why the Dr. sent my Dad in for testing. His Blood work was a little low, but no Lymph Node swelling or complaints.
Yet, seniors keep electing them. I suspect that as they turn on the pretty music, dim the lights and show you the flower movie that right then seniors will begin to suspect something’s up.
“Soylent Green is progress”
Actually, he was not ready to go and wanted every procedure possible.
It was his call but he suffered a great deal as a result.
I have no idea what I will want if I end up where he was but right now for me, it does not seem right.
Yep. My thoughts too. It is Obamacare.
The sequester is not to affect SS or Medicare. This article is a LIE. I am surprised people are falling for it. They are trying to blame the cuts on Republicans, when it has nothing to do with the sequester.
They have allowed themselves to be put in this situation. Not just allowed, but jumped in to it.
If they keep playing money games like this, they will no only loose the House, but allow the Dems to get a super majority.
Loose=lose.
Good I hate auto correct.
I’m sad my mother had to die a slow death....I wish we had pushed her to get chemo and all that ...but it was her choice...
even though I am totally against prolonging life just because you can, there is also something called giving “hope” to the very ill....
...I was in the same situation with my mother, who had ovarian cancer that did not respond to carboplaten treatments, and her alternative was a more lethal cocktail of chemotherapy that scared the crap out of her...both she and I believed the cocktail would have done nothing for her, and she chose to face her fate on her own terms, though that made for a very tough month and a half at the end...she was a few days short of 83 when she died, and she’d had enough...
...it is of course sad, that a decision like this has to be made, to waste away with terminal illness or poison yourself in hopes of poisoning the disease, but, that’s what we’ve got...
Who knows at this point? What I think is clear is that as a nation it looks like we are getting to the point where we have to choose between remaining as a world superpower and supporting science and research or being the caretaker of all the nation’s elderly, because doing all this at once will simply be completely impossible. I think anyone who thinks the US will ever be able to afford to police the world and be responsible for taking care of all our old people is living on a completely different plane of reality.
Hitler had the same argument, looks like you have arrived.
Are you sure that is where you want to be on that issue?
I don’t think Hitler is the only one who has arrived at that argument. Pretty much every other nation in the world today has either had to make that decision or face inevitable collapse. If we want to have our federal gov’t in charge of ensuring that everyone can live to be 95 or older, whether they can afford it or not, and be providing Medicare even to Senior Citizens who can afford it, or who have relatives who can afford it, we will lose much of our military’s ability to combat enemies at home and overseas. And if we still want be able to police the world and give out Medicare on demand, well forget about it. That is not going to happen. If we want all of our elderly to have access to Medicare, it is becoming clearly that it will come at a cost of us losing any status we had as a world superpower. And we will certainly not be able to afford to undertake all of the military operations that some conservatives want us to do. This is reality. Unicorns, fairies, elves and magic don’t actually exist and we as a nation will not be able to do everything.
Second, Medicare wasn't part of the sequester.
Third, obomacare cut Medicare by $7+ BILLION dollars. That's why they're being turned away - obomacuts.
Since the yearly Medicare budget number is 523 bil, that’s about a 1% cut.
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