The Future is Government Run Hospitals

It was reported by Business Week that on January 1st, 2010, the Mayo Clinic in Glendale, Arizona will stop seeing Medicare patients for the sole reason that the government pays too little for the hospital to see these patients and still make a profit.

President Barak Obama had stated in June of 2009 that the Mayo Clinics in Rochester, NY and the Cleveland Mayo Clinics are a model “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.”. However, the 3,000 patients at the Glendale Mayo Clinic will be required to pay cash if they want to continue to see their doctors.

Let’s think about this for a minute. If we logically follow this scenario through to the end we find a surprising scary situation.

First, we move to government run health care. The for profit Mayo Clinic in Glendale, AZ stated that the government already pays too little. This sentiment isn’t just a local Arizona phenomenon. Lori Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina, said “Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients.  If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”

What does this mean? We move to government run health care. Medicare is government run, right? Most hospitals take insurance (though you can get a better rate or pay schedule if you pay in cash).  So then, logically if the government pays too little currently for doctors and hospitals to take Medicare patients AND we switch to a government run health care system, we could easily deduce that the government run health care will also pay too little.

We can then draw the conclusion that the hospitals and doctors could no longer afford to take the government run national health insurance (because they pay too little and it isn’t profitable for the hospitals and doctors) so they only have two choices.

1. Take only cash paying patients.
2. Close their doors because they can’t make any money.

We can rule out the cash paying patients because no one will have extra money to pay cash after the outrageous fees for their government run health insurance they will be forced to purchase.

The most likely scenario would be that the hospitals would close their doors due to lack of funds to pay the bills.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

But, with government run health care and with patients who have no place to go do we really believe that the government would allow hospitals nationwide to close their doors and deny the serfs of the government health care system the medical care they need? Indeed not! Welcome to government run hospitals.

If we were to follow through the logic above we could easily see how the government would force the takeover of the health care system of hospitals and doctors just as they did with the automakers in 2009. The health care system is way to big to let fail. It doesn’t matter if the hospitals and doctors can’t make money. That’s not the point. We can’t accept the fact that government run health insurance, or any government run program, should actually operate, operate efficiently, and at the same time possible (*gasp*) make a profit.

And when we deny the truth and would rather hide our economic blackholes from the light of day, the government takes those entities that would normally be able to survive (by making a profit) and turning them into government run entities. And we’ve seen how that works out.

Social Security is broke. Medicare is going broke. Soon our health care system will be broke – if we allow this to continue.

If the government can’t run anything efficiently, as we have seen in the past, can we really expect this new Hope and Change to save the day now?

I don’t think I will hold my breath. I had better not. There won’t be a health care institution to care for me if I pass out.