Tag Archives: Mayo Clinic

Commentary

Should birth control pills be dispensed over the counter?

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Andrea Mrozek in the Ottawa Citizen.

Excerpt:

Welcome to the world of Do It Yourself Doctoring. Recent reports indicate that the birth control pill may become available in the United States without a prescription. Proponents will claim this makes women’s lives healthier and easier. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The pill is not Tylenol or cough medication. Certainly it’s widely used. However, forever downplayed are the nasty and known side effects: There’s the risk of blood clots leading to stroke. There’s mood swings. There’s increased risk of cervical cancer, (alongside the highly touted effect of decreasing the risk of ovarian cancer). There’s a 44-per-cent increased risk of developing breast cancer for young women prior to having children, a finding published in the Mayo Clinic journal in 2006. Anecdotal evidence has some women feeling permanently nauseous, others get depressed. Still others say they lose, wait for the irony, the desire to have sex.

[…]Even some pro-choice women’s health advocates prefer to teach natural family planning (the symptothermal method) with the solid claim that it works with the same efficacy as oral contraceptives. The advantages are that it’s not a product you purchase and it works with a woman’s natural body rhythm. The disadvantages? It takes time to learn and teach, and pharmaceutical companies can’t make money on it.

These voices are hushed up in part because pharmaceutical companies have long tentacles, and in part because the pill remains the darling of old-school feminists. It is the great equalizer. On it, you can have sex anytime without ever getting pregnant, just like men do — or so we are told.

Read the rest, it’s very interesting.

News

Prestigious Mayo Clinic will no longer accept Medicare patients

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Story from the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

President Obama last year praised the Mayo Clinic as a “classic example” of how a health-care provider can offer “better outcomes” at lower cost. Then what should Americans think about the famous Minnesota medical center’s decision to take fewer Medicare patients?

Specifically, Mayo said last week it will no longer accept Medicare patients at one of its primary care clinics in Arizona. Mayo said the decision is part of a two-year pilot program to determine if it should also drop Medicare patients at other facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota, which serve more than 500,000 seniors.

Mayo says it lost $840 million last year treating Medicare patients, the result of the program’s low reimbursement rates. Its hospital and four clinics in Arizona—including the Glendale facility—lost $120 million. Providers like Mayo swallow some of these Medicare losses, while also shifting the cost by charging more to private patients and insurers.

Of course, only governments can lose that much money and pretend they don’t have to change. “Mayo Clinic loses a substantial amount of money every year due to the reimbursement schedule under Medicare,” the institution said. “Decades of underfunding and paying for volume rather than value in Medicare have led us to this decision.”

If the government cannot deliver services for patients on Medicare, then why should we give them control of all of health care? It doesn’t make any sense.