Late yesterday, Mayo Clinic became aware of the concept of development of an Independent Medicare Advisory Council. We applaud the direction of this proposal. We view favorably the concept of an independent body that can move Medicare to a “value- based payment” model. An independent Medicare advisory commission focused on defining value, measuring it, and finding ways to pay for value could have significant, positive impact on health care for the long term. While we think the proposal’s timeline of 2014 is too long to wait to see value-based reforms, we look forward to working with the administration on refining and strengthening their new proposal. This, and other, bold concepts have the potential to “bend the cost curve” in U.S. health spending without compromising health.
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I look forward to better understanding your perspective in managing our countries health care needs for the masses.
I have the greatest respect for Mayo Clinic after my husband’s eight-month stay there in 2004-05, which thanks to the medical staff at Mayo had a happy ending, and am happy to see Mayo Clinic taking a proactive role in the process of health care reform in this country. My own article in response, which includes our experience in Rochester, is here:
When Mayo Clinic Speaks, I Listen
http://tinyurl.com/mkznzk
The Mayo Clinic thinking that they can bend any kind of curve positively in Washington is akin to delusion. The “independent” Council will be politicized, pressurized, marginalized and cauterized. The idea that a small group of medical “experts” can decide what is best practice when the various specialities spend every waking hour on this is insanity. Anything that is good that costs more is automatically vetoed by the statute. Only cheaper alternative need apply. Cynically, it’s obvious the Clinic sees this as a way to become the Government’s “Super Docs” who will determine the way forward with attendent prestige and riches. The world has had this experience with Govt. Doctors deciding the standard of medical practice previously in the Third Reich. Is it now happening here? Dr. R. Switzer
I will be 66 years old when my pacemaker battery runs out in a couple years. Under Obama’s plan (page 425) I will be advised and counseled to die nicely, rather than getting a new battery and taking resources from the many millions of illegal aliens who can go to the emergency room with the sniffles and have their bill paid.
I won’t be able to pay for the battery either, nor use any of the 4 health care plans I currently pay for (over $2500 / month).
Obama, and those who support taking $500 million from Medicare and rationing the balance are basically murderers.
Let me translate what IMAC would be, it would be a eufemism of the ‘Rationing Board on Health Care Redistribution’.
IMAC would be an accessory to the US government’s taking away of productive American’s rights to freely choose and spend on their own health care and giving health care rights and services to those who have not earned those, the have-nots.
Is Mayo really sure it would like to be part of denying health care to those who earned it and giving it to those who did not?
Jmall, it’s the Republicans who have been trying to kill Medicare for the past forty years — they call it “socialized medicine”, remember? GW Bush’s Medicare Part D “trigger” nonsense was the worst thing for Medicare in its history. If you got your information from legitimate sources instead of Crazy Sarah Palin, you’d know that.
So Peter Leefang, do you, like John McCain, favor destroying the “socialized medicine” of the VA? They take money from nice white people like you and give it to “have-nots” like poor black veterans.
But of course the whole point of the “Southern Strategy” was for the wealthy to get even richer by inflaming white working-class male hatred of blacks so that they’d drop support for social programs designed to get working-class people, black and white, a better deal. As Bob Herbert pointed out in his October 6, 2005 NYT column, Lee Atwater explained that way back in the early 1980s:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”
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