Mayo Sours On Obama Health Care Recipe

The Mayo Clinic has announced its opposition to the Obama health care plan because it is bad medicine, just days after President Obama held the Mayo Clinic out as a paragon of American health care. It would be the wrong prescription for health care for millions of Americans.

A world-renowned clinic that President Obama held up as an example of good medicine said Monday that the American people would be "losers" under the House's health care proposal, joining the growing chorus of critics the Obama administration is trying to fend off as the debate intensifies from Capitol Hill to Main Street.

Minnesota's not-for-profit Mayo Clinic, which Mr. Obama has repeatedly hailed as offering top quality care at affordable costs, blasted the House Democrats' version of the health care plan as lawmakers continue to grapple with several bills from each chamber and multiple committees.

The Mayo Clinic said there are some positive elements of the bill, but overall "the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher quality, more affordable health care for patients."

"In fact, it will do the opposite," clinic officials said, because the proposals aren't [R]patient-focused or results-oriented. "The real losers will be the citizens of the United States."

As I've been saying for some time now, the health care plans proffered by Democrats and which are pushed by President Obama to adopt health care reform by the August recess are going to blow out the deficit, are going to result in a lower standard of care, and millions of people will find that their health care choices are restricted more than they are now.

The Democrats for now are contemplating tweaking the tax hikes so that they become more palatable to the hesitant conservative members of the Democratic caucus. Sorry, but those plans should be killed because the tax hikes will still hit many of the same people who are supposed to be providing the quality care. It will also suck still more money out of the consumers pockets and redistribute it in a most inefficient manner that reduces the quality of health care for all.

Instead of focusing on making Medicare and Medicaid more efficient and cost effective, the Obama Administration wants to make all health care less responsive and imposes still more governmental control at a time when it is all too apparent that the government will never contain the costs without imposing rationing - a system that results in long waits for medical procedures that are routine here in the US and which can result in higher mortality rates.

It remains a myth that government health care will be cheaper than that provided privately under the current system. We've had 40 years to see the effects of Medicare and Medicaid on the ability to control costs, and the fact is that such costs have increased faster than in the private sector.

So, despite the mounting vociferous opposition, Obama still wants to ram through this plan before the August recess. That's quite telling considering that his polling numbers show rising opposition to his health care plans, and his only hope is to pass it when few people are truly cognizant of the effects of such massive changes to a significant portion of the US economy.

UPDATE:
This is so typical. President Obama, who has already declared a public health crisis that must be addressed by legislation winding its way through Congress at this very moment must be passed immediately, hasn't even got a clue as to what the current proposals contain. He hasn't read the damned bills, let alone the marked up legislation and the various amendments being added to them.

Oh, but he comes back and says that the bills need more work? I guess that's his way of saying that more pork must be added to make sure that Democrats don't bolt and end his chances of completely revising the health care industry.