From Bloomberg:

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.

Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said.

“We firmly believe that Medicare needs to be reformed,” Yardley said in a Dec. 23 e-mail. “It has been true for many years that Medicare payments no longer reflect the increasing cost of providing services for patients.”

Mayo will assess the financial effect of the decision in Glendale to drop Medicare patients “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona,” he said.

(more…)

In a recent article published in The Atlantic Jonathan Gruber, an economist from MIT was enthused over the Senate’s healthcare bill because of its kitchen sink approach to the problem of rising healthcare costs. “I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here….I can’t think of anything I’d do that they are not doing in the bill.” This quote is a distillation of the problem I have with the whole healthcare reform effort. It seems like a case of throw it up on a wall and see if it sticks.

From the beginning of the debate and the resultant bills in Congress there has been no thought put into the root cause of the high cost of healthcare. As usual the players who were allowed to sit at the table were the ones who had the most to lose if the status quo really changed. Special interest groups (i.e., unions, hospitals corporation, medical insurance industry, pharmaceutical industry, and the AMA) each flooded Washington with money and controlled both the argument, and the perceived solutions for the mess that has become our healthcare system. At no point were physicians on the front line who deliver patient care or patients who are victims of the health insurance maze given a voice in the process let alone a seat at the table.

(more…)

While Nancy Pelosi is excited that health care reform is only going to cost us $900 billion over ten years,  I wonder how we are going to get out of the current fiscal mess we’re in. Seriously. The GAO has a new report on how our long term financial situation is going to look like. A short sample:

“The federal budget deficit soared to a record $1.4 trillion in the fiscal year that ended in September, a chasm of red ink unequaled in the postwar era that threatens to complicate the most ambitious goals of the Obama administration, including plans for fresh spending to create jobs and spur economic recovery.

Still, the figure represents a significant improvement over the darkest deficit projections, which had been as much as $400 billion higher earlier this year, when the economy was wallowing in recession. Since then, the outlook has brightened and a government bailout has successfully stabilized the nation’s troubled financial sector. In a report released Friday, Treasury Department officials said the government had spent $132 billion less than expected in August, due primarily to a drop in anticipated spending on the banking bailout.”

You’ve got to love the “the glass is half-full” outlook of the GAO!

And yet, they do show that without social security and Medicare-Medicaid reforms things will get much much worse and fast.

Check out the charts in the report, they will stop you from having kids.