Mar
21
Will hospitals accept the public option insurance if is passed in the Health Care Bill?
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Question: The Mayo Clinic in Glendale Arizona announced today that they will not accept Medicare patients in the future. They lost $120 million on Medicare patients in 2009. These losses will be passed on to other hospitals who treat these patients. This creates a domino effect. Will public option insurance be useless since few hospitals will accept it?
7 Comments
March 21st, 2010 at 4:53 am
Um…Medicare is not the public option.
March 21st, 2010 at 5:15 am
no .. the fascist gov’t under obama will just take over the private hospital industry cause it’s “too big to fail” or some other BS “emergency” … then they will force it down their throats … just like he does to the majority who don’t want his Odramacare
March 21st, 2010 at 5:16 am
Medicare has been grossly underfunded for years, and with the price of health care costs rising much faster than inflation and wages, it’s not surprising they aren’t accepting it.
Hospitals lose millions taking care of people without insurance, I”m sure they would much rather take care of people with that insurance than none at all.
March 21st, 2010 at 6:16 am
The present form of the proposed Health Care Bill will not pass the House of Representatives without a fight. There are other Hospitals who will not accept certain patients.
March 21st, 2010 at 6:54 am
Public Option is not medicare. It doesn’t refer to a particular brand of insurance or anything. It merely references the payer. Public Option means the government pays for it. The law will not allow anyone who is in a registered, legal health care facility to refuse this insurance.
The problem for me is that they also will not allow you to refuse to have it.
Since I never get sick and have perfect health all the time, to me it represents a meaningless and useless added expense. I don’t get insurance to help everyone else. I get it either to help myself or because the law requires me to.
March 21st, 2010 at 7:45 am
The short answer is no, if this bill passes, the majority of our well trained medical personell will find other lines of work. Sad, but true.
March 21st, 2010 at 8:34 am
I don’t think it’s safe to assume that hospitals WOULDN’T accept a public option plan … especially if a really large number of people take the public option. Folks would take the public option if they find that the plans offered in that OPTION are as comprehensive as other plans in the proposed national insurance exchange (which will almost surely result from the proposed legislation).
The public option, then, is just the government’s own plan within an approved list of plans in the national insurance exchange. The idea is to create an option where the plan is just as good as competing private plans but with lower costs (because marketing and other overhead costs would be a lot less).
What’s happening with the Mayo is a reflection of the need for Medicare reimbursement adjustment, and that’s a huge concern.