Cause & Effect?
Is this leading to this? Here’s the first this:
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.”
When the Mayo Clinic organization announces that they won’t accept more Medicare patients because they’re losing too much money ($840,000,000), there’s bound to be a dramatic, predictable reaction. This utterly refutes the Democrats’ claim that their Medicare cuts won’t lead to rationing.
This also proves that the Democrats’ health care policies won’t save money without price controls. As baby boomers retire, the Democrats’ Medicare cuts will lead to rationing, the quality of their care decrease and ultimately cost lives.
Here’s the second this:
Democrats have lost yet another touted recruit, this time in Kansas.
State Sen. Laura Kelly (D) just announced her withdrawal from the race to face Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.). She becomes the fifth formidable recruit to bow out in recent weeks.
“I have been forced to make a decision between honoring the pledge I made to the people in my Senate district and my firm conviction that the people of the 2nd congressional district deserve a truly independent voice in Congress,” Kelly said in a statement. “This has been a very hard decision, but it is the right one.”
Kelly joins several recent dropouts, including businessman Jack McDonald, a well-funded challenger to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) who announced last week that he wouldn’t run. The others are Ohio state Rep. Todd Book, who was running against Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio); former Tennessee Commerce and Insurance Commissioner Paula Flowers, who was running for Rep. Zach Wamp’s (R-Tenn.) seat; and Solana Beach City Councilman Dave Roberts, who was running against Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.).
The Democrats’ recruitment campaign is going poorly because their agenda has turned people off. It didn’t help that leadership kept pushing moderates off the cliff for ‘the greater good.’
Potential candidates will decide that they won’t run knowing that they’re seen by Rahm Emanuel and Speaker Pelosi as interchangeable, replaceable parts.
The Democrats’ radical agenda is, in my opinion, leading to a poor candidate recruitment campaign. That’s why they’re facing a difficult election cycle.
Technorati Tags: Elections, Recruitment, Candidates, Health Care, Medicare Cuts, Rationing, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Democrats, Election 2010
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
January 2nd, 2010 at 10:06 am
Just as Obama ran (and is still running) against GWB, the Republicans in 2010 and 2012 will have to run against Obama, Holder, Napolitano, Geithner, and the rest of the Chicago Machine Mob that is running roughshod over this country.
Am I surprised these candidates are dropping out? Not in the least. Only a few of the existing jackasses in charge in Congress are too stupid to realize their being jerked at the end of the Mob’s chains (Pelosi and Reid come immediately to mind, but they’re certainly not the only ones that stupid), and these bright new faces understand it’s only a matter of time that they’ll get the same treatment.
January 3rd, 2010 at 7:30 pm
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head Carlos. There is intelligent life in the Democratic party after all, for the time being anyway.