You might have missed this item from Bloomberg on New Year’s Eve:
The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.
This is the future of any government “cost-cutting” scheme in health care. The president and other command-and-control health care reformers are trying to wring the profit out of being a doctor. Currently, in the case of the government programs that underpay for services, the price controls naturally lead to rationing of care for those within them when doctors refuse to see them.
It’s one more illustration of how the mere possession of health insurance is neither the same thing as nor a guarantee of access to health care. It’s also a cautionary tale for the creation of new public health insurance programs.
