Mayo Clinic Drops Medicare Patients in Arizona as Obama Model Bemoans Cost...

Subject:	Mayo Clinic Drops Medicare Patients in Arizona as Obama Model Bemoans Cost...
Date:	Fri, 1 Jan 2010 13:41:48 -0500

Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients
By David Olmos
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHoYSI84VdL0
Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- 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.

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." Mayo's move to drop Medicare patients may be
copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients
from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of
Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.

"Many physicians have said, 'I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of
Medicare patients,'" said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg,
North Carolina. "If you truly know your business costs and you are losing
money, it doesn't make sense to do more of it."

Medicare Loss

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.

Nationwide, doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare
patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007, a
payment gap that has remained stable during the last decade, according to a
March report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a panel that
advises Congress on Medicare issues. Congress last week postponed for two
months a 21.5 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements for doctors.

National Participation

Medicare covered an estimated 45 million Americans at the end of 2008,
according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency in
charge of the programs. While 92 percent of U.S. family doctors participate
in Medicare, only 73 percent of those are accepting new patients under the
program, said Heim of the national physicians' group, citing surveys by the
Leawood, Kansas-based organization.

Greater access to primary care is a goal of the broad overhaul supported by
Obama that would provide health insurance to about 31 million more
Americans. More family doctors are needed to help reduce medical costs by
encouraging prevention and early treatment, Obama said in a June 15 speech
to the American Medical Association meeting in Chicago.

Reid Cherlin, a White House spokesman for health care, declined comment on
Mayo's decision to drop Medicare primary care patients at its Glendale
clinic.

Medicare Costs

Mayo's Medicare losses in Arizona may be worse than typical for doctors
across the U.S., Heim said. Physician costs vary depending on business
expenses such as office rent and payroll. "It is very common that we hear
that Medicare is below costs or barely covering costs," Heim said.

Mayo will continue to accept Medicare as payment for laboratory services and
specialist care such as cardiology and neurology, Yardley said.

Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute's Health Policy Center in
Washington, D.C., said physicians' claims of inadequate reimbursement are
overstated. Rather, the program faces a lack of medical providers because
not enough new doctors are becoming family doctors, internists and
pediatricians who oversee patients' primary care.

"Some primary care doctors don't have to see Medicare patients because there
is an unlimited demand for their services," Berenson said. When patients
with private insurance can be treated at 50 percent to 100 percent higher
fees, "then Medicare does indeed look like a poor payer," he said.

Annual Costs

A Medicare patient who chooses to stay at Mayo's Glendale clinic will pay
about $1,500 a year for an annual physical and three other doctor visits,
according to an October letter from the facility. Each patient also will be
assessed a $250 annual administrative fee, according to the letter. Medicare
patients at the Glendale clinic won't be allowed to switch to a primary care
doctor at another Mayo facility.

A few hundred of the clinic's Medicare patients have decided to pay cash to
continue seeing their primary care doctors, Yardley said. Mayo is helping
other patients find new physicians who will accept Medicare.

"We've had many patients call us and express their unhappiness," he said.
"It's not been a pleasant experience."

Mayo's decision may herald similar moves by other Phoenix- area doctors who
cite inadequate Medicare fees as a reason to curtail treatment of the
elderly, said John Rivers, chief executive of the Phoenix-based Arizona
Hospital and Healthcare Association.

"We've got doctors who are saying we are not going to deal with Medicare
patients in the hospital" because they consider the fees too low, Rivers
said. "Or they are saying we are not going to take new ones in our
practice."

To contact the reporter on this story: David Olmos in San Francisco at
dolmos@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: December 31, 2009 00:01 EST