General Discussion

flamingdem

(39,312 posts) Sun Apr 7, 2013, 06:39 PM Apr 2013

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

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/03/cancer-clinics-are-turning-away-thousands-of-medicare-patients-blame-the-sequester/

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.

Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially.

Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.

“If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. “The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now.”

After an emergency meeting Tuesday, Vacirca’s clinics decided that they would no longer see one-third of their 16,000 Medicare patients.

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/04/07/sequester-cuts-into-cancer-treatment/

The Washington Post reports that cancer clinics across the country are turning away medicare patients as a result of the across-the-board sequester cuts to the budget. The issue revolves around chemotherapy drugs that have to be administered by doctors. Doctors get reimbursed for the drugs by medicare, plus a six percent overhead fee for ordering and storing the drugs, the two percent cut to Medicare Plan B, the portion that covers doctor care, translates into a 33% cut in their fees, which doctors are say makes it too expensive to see some Medicare patients who were previously receiving care.

Sarah Kliff, the Washington Post reporter who broke this story, told Weekends with Alex Witt:

“I’ve talked to clinics from New York to South Carolina that are turning away patients, some say its in the thousands, some in the hundreds…doctors are saying it’s a choice between either seeing this set of patients or keeping my business open.”

Doctors are in turn sending these patients to hospitals to receive chemotherapy treatment, which leads to more medicare spending and higher U.S. health care costs over all. This unintended consequence that runs counter to the sequester goal of deficit reduction, “There are things like this that no one really thought through,” Kliff explains.

Because the cuts are mandated in every federal program it would take legislative action to secure chemotherapy treatment for medicare patients. Kliff told Alex that since her piece was published on Wednesday she has witnessed a growing number of constituents contacting their legislators urging reform; some physicians are even handing out lawmakers’ phone numbers to patients. As to whether the media attention and grassroots action will lead to policy change, that remains to be seen.