Posted on 01/17/2010 1:54:37 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Two weeks ago the Mayo Clinic shocked the nation when it closed the doors of one of its Arizona clinics to patients on Medicare. Just this past June President Obama himself praised Mayo as a model of medical efficiency noting that Mayo gives “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.” If Mayo feels compelled to walk away from this government-run program, others will surely follow. The nation must understand why.
Doctors are leaving Medicare for two reasons: one obvious, the other more concealed.
The first is simple—the math:
1) For the past decade Medicare consistently paid physicians 20% less than traditional insurance companies for identical service.
2) On January 1, 2010 Washington made hidden cuts to Medicare by altering its billing codes.
3) Medicare will cut physician reimbursement by another 21% on March 1. The CBO said this cut must take place if the Senate healthcare bill was to “reduced the deficit.”
4) Even more, Congress pledged to cut Medicare by yet another $500 billion. Again, the CBO said this additional cut must take place if the Senate healthcare bill was to “reduced the deficit.” Many physicians were operating at a loss even before this series of massive cuts. In 2008, Mayo Clinic posted an $840 million loss in caring for Medicare patients. No businesses can survive when patient care expenses exceed revenue.
The second is more ominous—Washington’s increasingly abusive posture toward physicians. President Obama reflected this attitude last summer. On national television, he stated as fact a surgeon is paid between $30,000 and $50,000 for amputating a patient’s foot.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
yes RJR generalized too much too much, but at some level the criticism is valid—physicians abandoned that oath. we should have never accepted abortionists or pro-homo shrinks, but even more to your point, we probably never should have accepted medicare. The health care profession should have figured out a way to do this without govt. IF we had really been as committed Christians as we should have been, once govt took over schools, individual locales should have pulled out and set up something private. If there is a will, there is a way.
Obama’s Death Panels...bump
We have recently been dumped into Medicare. We enjoyed a very expensive private plan up until now. It cost a fortune but we never worried about being nickel and dimed over tests and appointments. We are not afflicted with any major health issues ( thank God) but found out pretty quick we are at the mercy of government boneheads. We are thinking of options and are looking for solutions to this government run boondoggle. Is there a private group for senior that bypsss this Democrat mess?
I feel bad for doctors. What are they to do? Have a quota of Medicare/non-paying patients that, once reached, isn't exceeded for economic reasons? "Nah, take anybody," sez the gvt., and then hospitals close and everyone wonders why. It's like education: All the special programs that are in place to help the children of illiterate illegals, wasting the money that could help advance even further the children of literate citizens. Here in Gawdhelpus-ifornia, test scores would soar, employment would rise, and the gaping hole in the budget would be closed (or at least shrunk) if the illegals were deported. But nobody's going to even approach that until the system fails completely.
i saw rjr’s post in a spiritual vein, that since MDs as a group accepted abortion, and perhaps their position could have much mitigated the scotus ruling, then God allows the docs to suffer punishment. There is always danger of reading the Divine Mind so suffice to say while I do believe God intervenes in our affairs, it is a very risky and probably foolish proposition to draw anything but the the quickest and easist conclusions.
Of course I absolutely agree with your point on abortion. Besides just killing 40 mil humans, in the long run it kills America, and on a more personal note, it kills our retirement as our SS goes in the crapper. What bufoons and idiots our Ivy League leaders are. You could play Age of Empires and learn in one day you don’t let in millions of people in your country to work to replace all your aborted.
The chickens are coming home to roost for sure on that point. It is a law of nature—the future belongs to the fertile and those willing to work and raise families.
Obamacare will chase the best doctors into retirement or offshore. It will reduce the lure of Medicine to the level of Education in the universities. The quantity of care will decline precipitously and the quality as well.
Not only do I have wonderful doctors, the nurses are also great. It's these corporate holding companies that are messing up the system.
Never have I had a social worker visit me until 2009. I told two of them to get out. I'm not on welfare and they have no business dictating to me. I have paid for private insurance for over 40 years.
Tort reform is what all of us need.
Bullsh*t no doubt, but think--isn't your life worth 30K? Amputations of feet generally are due to gangrene, which will kill you soon if not separated from the body. How much is your life worth? 30K is two years' worth of minumum wage.
Oh man. If that ain't tagline material, I don't know what is.
And 2+2=purple, as all right-thinking people know.
State and federal laws and the marketplace determine whether or not abortions are performed, not "physicians." Physicians in a group wouldn't agree on the time of day. Many would never perform abortions or associate with those who did.
There are about a million physicians in the United States, and under 3000 abortionists. Under one half of one precent of physicians are abortionists. So long as abortion is legal, abortionists will do continue to do their dirty work. It doesn't matter a whit whether or not most physicians accept abortionists as "fellow professionals."
As for the Hippocratic Oath, the original Oath is so outdated that it now sounds bizarre: "I swear by Apollo, the healer, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea..." Modern abortionists might readily agree to abide by the Oath's prohibition of the use of a pessary (a soaked piece of wood) for abortion, since they now use other methods. There are newer versions of the Hippocratic Oath, but even those few versions that still mention abortion are unenforceable.
Unenforceable oaths won't prevent abortions.
Your "doctors are only in it for the money" seems a common enough slander that I suppose it deserves a response. Why on earth would a physician be in it only for money? Helping patients is immensely rewarding in itself. The work is serious, challenging, ethical (hopefully), and long-term. Being a physician can earn you respect from colleagues and the community. It doesn't exactly hurt one's social life. A physician who practices only for the money will miss plenty of good stuff.
Also, many physicians who believed that a medical degree would guarantee financial security have learned otherwise.
These things aren't so simple. Except, apparently, to you.
It’ll be worse with ObamaCare...
I've worked all these years...
I can't collect for maybe another 6-10 years but dammit....I need the money and I have earned it...
Newt Gingrich said that Medicare would “wither on the vine”. Looks like he was right.
GRAMMAR and SPELLING really do matter!
The following error
bill was to “reduced the deficit”
was repeated TWICE in the article posted.
For crying out loud, people! If we want to inform the LIEberal elitists that we conservative "hoi-polloi" are no less intelligent than they claim to be, we absolutely CANNOT make such junior-high sophomoric mistakes!
Spell check twice, and use a grammar filter (like MS Outlook offers) if you must, but let's not be stupid about this: the LIEBERALS are looking for ANYTHING they can degrade us with!
I know it sounds like "the spelling police", or "the grammar police", but seriously, think about it: When someone comes up to you and says something that is so twisted in its "English" that you have to think about and translate it into terms you understand, I'll bet you don't say to yourself "What an erudite and intelligent person!".
My money is on: you're thinking (if being generous with your "inside voice") "I wish that person spoke so we could understand him!"
Boo-Hoo. In my part of Canada, absolutely NO chiropractic visits are covered (we USED to get 12 per year, with a small co-pay).
Because the AMA and the CMA consider Chiropractic a "Quackery", revel in the knowledge that you too will soon enjoy the pleasure of paying the full-tilt-boogie for your snap-crackle-pop treatment.
I personally don't mind that much, since I visit my cruncher between three and seven times a year. At $55/ 10 minute visit, it's worth every penny.
BTW, if your cruncher has buffaloed you into bi-weekly "maintenance" visits, get a new one. You're being scammed. I know, because I was born with a spinal deformity that surgery cannot fix, but chiropractic eases.
personally I’ve never thought of Drs. as money grubbers. To bad people are so blind and jealous that they can’t see that the dr. went to school for years, went through a residency which most people wouldn’t even know how to deal with and then when they finally begin getting reimbursed for their knowledge, have to pay off their school loans the people they want to help call them greedy. I usually tell someone complaining all that. They might not actually listen but they stop complaining around me.
Which is why you, and millions of other people, are victims in this. Money you thought was being saved for you was spent as quickly as they got it, and more. In truth, instead of FICA, your income tax was more than doubled, and you didn’t know it.
It did buy a lot of things. It defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and created the Pax Americana, which has prevented many other major wars that would have cost American blood and treasure.
It has staved off many recessions and even depressions and given us all a higher standard of living than we could have afforded otherwise. Things like our interstate highway system and our federal aviation system.
But it was all a lie, and an unconstitutional lie. There is no way it could mathematically continue, and was so improbable a system that even the founding fathers saw that public largesse was unsustainable, “bread and circuses”, as the Romans called it.
And on the other side, it is a major article of faith among socialists, who lack the common sense and pattern recognition, and mathematics, to see how it could never work for any great length of time.
So you will have to do without. But the adjustment back to reality won’t likely be as bad as imagined, either, since many people are in the same boat. You won’t get what was promised, but you will probably get something. Just not from the national government, because it is, and never was, their job to give, only to take away.
Twenty or thirty years ago, maybe. Today the government is likely to have to default on its debt, so it is unlikely to be giving tax cuts any time soon.
“No one can be so stupid as to do what they are doing and think it will do anything except harm.”
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I see no other way to account for it. American voters may be stupid enough to vote for the Rats but if they, Obama included, were stupid enough to think they are making matters better with these insane moves they would be sitting in a corner blowing spit bubbles and making strange noises as they soil their diapers. They are not idiots as some say, they are EVIL!
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