Please Pass the Mayo

By Joseph Ashby

The train wreck that is Obamacare just added another stop on its route. Bloomberg is reporting on a Mayo Clinic announcement that the medical care provider will drop thousands of Medicare patients from its Glendale Arizona clinic.

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.”

The article goes on to explain that the Mayo’s nationwide operation lost $840 million in 2008 treating Medicare patients. All this before Obamacare takes hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare funding.

The point is not that Medicare is underfunded per se, but rather that government intervention into the insurance and medical care markets has been disastrous. As each year passes, the magnitude of that disaster increases. Obama’s health care overhaul will accelerate the process exponentially.