Is the Mayo Clinic a Model Or a Mirage? Jury Is Still Out.
Duplication Wouldn't Be Easy, Critics Say
By Alec MacGillis and Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 20, 2009
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- The Mayo Clinic looms out of the prairie here like the mecca it has become, a world-renowned medical complex that is often cited by President Obama as his model for national heath-care reform.
"Look at what the Mayo Clinic is able to do. It's got the best quality and the lowest cost of just about any system in the country," Obama said in Minneapolis this month. "So what we want to do is we want to help the whole country learn from what Mayo is doing. . . . That will save everybody money."
Few dispute the prowess of Mayo, which brings in $9 billion in revenue a year and hosts 250 surgeries a day. But a battle is underway among health-care experts and lawmakers over whether its success can be so easily replicated. Before embracing a fundamentally new approach to health care, dissenting experts and lawmakers say, Congress should scrutinize the assumption that a Mayo-type model is the answer.
They point out that Mayo's patients are wealthier, healthier and less racially diverse than those elsewhere in the country. It has few poor patients. It limits the number of procedures it performs per patient, but the rates it charges private insurers and self-paying patients is higher than average, allowing it to thrive despite the lower Medicare spending cited by its supporters.
(Continued here.)
By Alec MacGillis and Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 20, 2009
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- The Mayo Clinic looms out of the prairie here like the mecca it has become, a world-renowned medical complex that is often cited by President Obama as his model for national heath-care reform.
"Look at what the Mayo Clinic is able to do. It's got the best quality and the lowest cost of just about any system in the country," Obama said in Minneapolis this month. "So what we want to do is we want to help the whole country learn from what Mayo is doing. . . . That will save everybody money."
Few dispute the prowess of Mayo, which brings in $9 billion in revenue a year and hosts 250 surgeries a day. But a battle is underway among health-care experts and lawmakers over whether its success can be so easily replicated. Before embracing a fundamentally new approach to health care, dissenting experts and lawmakers say, Congress should scrutinize the assumption that a Mayo-type model is the answer.
They point out that Mayo's patients are wealthier, healthier and less racially diverse than those elsewhere in the country. It has few poor patients. It limits the number of procedures it performs per patient, but the rates it charges private insurers and self-paying patients is higher than average, allowing it to thrive despite the lower Medicare spending cited by its supporters.
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
FYI : Are you aware that a Mayo Arizona clinic is changing it's rules covering roughly 3,200 Medicare patients beginning in January ?
According to the local newspaper "Current Medicare patients of the clinic may still continue to see their physician at Mayo Clinic Family Medicine - Arrowhead after Jan. 1 if they agree to pay a $250 annual administrative fee, office visit fees — which the letter states can range from $175 to $400 per visit — and agree to make an appropriate number of visits each year for their condition, including physicals. The total annual costs for the fee, physical and three office visits is expected to be about $1,500 annually."
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