Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the seques

[Survivalcookie]

Here it is...this is what all you who voted for Obama gets, if you have a mother or father on medicare with cancer kiss them good by, many will die. i would bet this is in Obamacare and he is using sequestration as an excuse...all the while saying the conservatives were throwing grandma over the cliff.



Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the sequester.

 

[public servant]

Just so you're aware...there are plenty of "conservatives" on INGO that would do away with Medicare...thus also, "throwing grandma over the cliff."

Why is this any different?

 

[cobber]

I hope this news doesn't ruin the president's vacation!! Let's hurry up and get that important gun legislation passed, obviously far more important, because it could save ONE child.

 

[HeadlessRoland]

The article is fraught with errors.

Nurses administer chemotherapeutic agents 99% of the time.
Surgical Oncologists could be the exception, but Medicare D does in fact cover most regimens, albeit with prior authorizations needed.
Now, CMMS did recently establish 'pathways' and compendia of treatment regimens governing reimbursement, but those pathways /regimens are 99% or more aligned with National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines, at least for now, so it will have but an indirect effect for most cancer patients for the time being, unless their doctor is a renegade who does not adhere to best practices or established treatments.

Now, if private practices are not finding it profitable enough to treat patients, that is certainly their choice, but as a patient I would not utilize their services if they were to treat my loved ones that shabbily. Local hospitals tend to be able to absorb costs better, often due to non-profit status and/or 340B status, and they generally do treat Medicare/Medicaid patients.

Our medical system is a nightmare, but it won't be solved by nationalization, which is not a problem of sequestration, but of the new PPACA and all the horrors it portends. If you think patients having to get treated elsewhere is bad, just imagine when there won't be certain drugs produced at all because Government has forced drug manufacturers to accept certain profit margins a la 340B, which may or may not cover their cost. Nationally, there are drug shortages - severe, long-lasting shortages - of everything from electrolytes to specialty oncologic agents, and have been ramping up over the past two years, and this problem is only bound to get worse. When government steps in and alters the market and institutes false price ceilings and manipulates an otherwise free market, those manipulations will be felt, and there will be consequence to so doing. I currently worry more about the fact that there are raw material shortages of things like Taxol and Magnesium Sulfate and Potassium Chloride and Potassium Phosphate than about private practices no longer accepting Medicare/Medicaid - although I will concede that it might be a problem for patients who live far from other medical centers/health systems/clinics or who are unable to drive or reach other medical centers/health systems/clinics, raw materials/production shortages are a more direct problem, and a problem that will continue to happen. Sodium bicarbonate 8.4% has been on shortage for months now, and at least one person that I'm aware of locally died because that person was quite acidotic, but that very cheap, inexpensive drug just could not be procured in the quantities needed to help reverse her condition. How do you tell someone's family that their daughter, mother, sister, aunt, son, father, brother, uncle has died because you literally couldn't obtain enough of a cheap, heretofore plentiful drug? It's difficult. But imagine that situation compounded and expanded across the entire spectrum of human malady, and realize that this was just one drug in one instance for one condition. Realize that there are ten thousand different ways the human body can malfunction or need assistance, and you begin to understand the scope of the problem we're facing, and will continue to face until the PPACA is repealed. The past two years have been very rough on a national level, and the coming years will be even more dire with regard to drug availability and supply. I hope the Medicare/Medicaid patients successfully switch their business to a provider who will accept them, and I hope even more that we all can get the treatment we need if and when the time comes.

 

[John Titor]

No problem in my mind let them die .
The people at large in this country wanted socialism by the way they did or did not participate in the system . So they can live under what they did ... they did nothing .. now they can have nothing .
My parents are dead so are the wife we have plans that will circumvent cancer .

 

[cobber]

The health care is "affordable", but you get turned away...?

Forward, comrades!

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

Government funding of healthcare--Nobody envisioned rationing of care when financial resources got tight, now did they?

 

[cobber]

Government funding of healthcare--Nobody envisioned rationing of care when financial resources got tight, now did they?

I'm sure the bureaucrats did all along. But now I hear we're getting "navigators" or somesuch to help people figure out the new law. $2 billion in CA alone?

Now THAT'S a real savings, er...

 

[jedi]

Forward, comrades!

It's all snowballs fault! He was here.

 

[Sfrandolph]

Obama and his thugs want this. They want the elderly and diseased to die. They view them as nothing but a drag on their kingdom. The way Obamacare is designed is the proof. We are on our own. The money that we paid into medicare is gone. Don't cry over spilled milk. Just move on.

 

[Survivalcookie]

Very interesting comments....having seen both my parents die of cancer while on medicare...I think doing away with cancer treatments paid for by medicare might be a good thing, considering all the chemo and radiation, did not prolong their life, it just made the quality of their life awful until the end.

My problem is that they gave these people hope and now just snatched it away. I know there are some very curable cancers like lymphoma that should at least be given a shot...but in reality many die with it and never know they had it.

 

[indykid]

Soylent Green and we won't have to worry about old people getting sick... there will not be any old people to get sick, problem solved.

 

[upalot]

My brother is on Medicare (68 years old) and has cancer. So far Medicare has paid for all his Chemo and radiation including CyberKnife at U Of Ls Brown cancer center. Without medicare he would have been SOL.

 

[Blackhawk2001]

I heard a guy who claimed to be an oncologist talk about this yesterday. ObamaCare cut $700B from Medicare in order to get under the supposed $1T cost cap. OBC cuts the doctors' reimbursement for various cancer treatment drugs to levels below their profit margin. In other words, it's costing the doctors money to treat their patients. Nobody can run a business that way, so that's why some practices are turning away Medicare cancer patients. Look for the rest of your "affordable health care" to go the same way.

Seems like whatever the gov't touches turns to *****.

 

[Kirkd]

You will see more physicians who will drop medicare because of the 2% cut. I know it doesn't sound like much, but the bottom line is Medicare doesn't cover the overhead and sometimes it is a choice to stay in business or not. Once you drop out if Medicare, you can contract directly with the patient for services and not have to go through the red tape Medicare put you through.

 

[JokerGirl]

They really need to be reporting as to what the bulk of the cancer they are treating is.

Cancers caused by smoking are more or less a lost cause at around 70% of them end up dying even with treatment.

I have a hard time agreeing to treat any type of cancer that was self-induced.

 

[ocsdor]

A Real Cancer Treatment Center:

http://www.biocarehospital.com

 

[HeadlessRoland]

Very interesting comments....having seen both my parents die of cancer while on medicare...I think doing away with cancer treatments paid for by medicare might be a good thing, considering all the chemo and radiation, did not prolong their life, it just made the quality of their life awful until the end.

My problem is that they gave these people hope and now just snatched it away. I know there are some very curable cancers like lymphoma that should at least be given a shot...but in reality many die with it and never know they had it.

Wow. There is so much overreach in this I absolutely can't believe you, as a liberty-minded person, would say it. So simply because your loved ones' tumors did not respond to treatment, you wish to deny treatment to millions of others? While I am sorry to hear that they did not respond, I have seen several people be cured, absolutely cured - not just treated, but reversed and eliminated, of several maladies that chemotherapeutic agents and/or radiation have absolutely resolved. So before you mindlessly encourage the government to otherwise deny useful treatments to millions, I would suggest you take out your anger with the physicians who did not clearly explain what percentage of overall survival, remission, response, etc. meant clearly, if you felt they were deceived.

And I would agree that government has no place in insuring anyone, but now that we're here, let's not just slaughter millions without transitioning them to private insurance, or at least giving them the option to do so, shall we? I would rather not have the blood of millions on my hands.

 

[Jerchap2]

The so-called sequestration is a joke. Boehner, the weak RINO, made a bad deal, as he does so often. It gives the leftists a chance to cut what is painful and blame it on the Republicans. Disgusting.

 

[Boonl1776]

Is Phillip Morris chipping in?