When looking for ways to make health care less expensive, Congress would do well not to overlook the Mayo Clinic. Not that they could. The acclaimed medical group appears to have launched a major offensive against Obamacare, citing their own experience trying to provide coverage despite limitations placed on them by the current system.
Just yesterday Mayo joined a number of other medical groups in an open letter to Congress, calling for a method of reform that emphasizes patient care, rather than paying tribute to quotas, caps, and rationing:
The President challenged you and your colleagues to look to high quality efficient healthcare providers for ways to improve health care. Congress must encourage all U.S. physicians and hospitals to focus on quality, not quantity, and ultimately deliver better health for all Americans at lower cost.
We urge you to insist that reform legislation includes a method that pays for value and quality, rather than the quantity of medical procedures. Currently, Medicare pays the most to ten states that often provide poorer outcomes, safety, and service at higher cost, and much less to most of the country where providers demonstrate generally better outcomes, safety and service at lower cost. As healthcare providers, we believe that insertion of a measurement of value into the payment system is a critical step to change provider behavior throughout the country and “bend the cost curve” in U.S. health spending without compromising health.
…‘Pay for value’ is the only tactic that will “bend the cost curve” in U.S. health spending, improve the quality of care that our citizens deserve, and create a long and healthy future for both the American people and the American healthcare system.
In a blog post on their health policy website, they write that the current bill would actually make things worse:
Although there are some positive provisions in the current House Tri-Committee bill – including insurance for all and payment reform demonstration projects – the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients. In fact, it will do the opposite.
In general, the proposals under discussion are not patient focused or results oriented. Lawmakers have failed to use a fundamental lever – a change in Medicare payment policy – to help drive necessary improvements in American health care. Unless legislators create payment systems that pay for good patient results at reasonable costs, the promise of transformation in American health care will wither. The real losers will be the citizens of the United States.
And in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, Dr. Denis Cortese (Mayo’s president and CEO) and Jeffrey Korsmo (executive director of the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center) emphasize Mayo’s experience caring for patients in a meaningful way. The secret? Paying for value. What gets in the way of this? Government:
Despite the fact that we strive to give patients the right level of care — everything they need, no more and no less — we consistently suffer huge financial losses due to the government price-controlled Medicare payment system, which financially punishes providers who offer higher quality care at a lower cost.
Last year alone, Mayo Clinic lost hundreds of millions of dollars caring for Medicare beneficiaries — the very patients with complex, complicated illnesses that we want to see and can serve well. Because of this shortfall, our other patients pay more to make up the difference. Someday soon, neither Mayo Clinic nor those other payers will be able to afford this situation.
Meanwhile, overall Medicare spending is ballooning because many providers have responded to price controls by increasing the number of services they offer . . . spending less and less time with patients but having them return for more frequent office visits, tests and procedures, driving up the volume of billable services.
The criticisms leveled by Mayo shouldn’t be ignored — either by Obama, or by the mainstream press. Unlike insurance companies easily caricatured as “greedy,” Mayo has earned plaudits for its level of patient-care, and can hardly be dismissed as a profiteering venture.
