Cancer Clinics Are Already Turning Away Thousands of Medicare Patients. For Shame!

05 Apr, 2013 by John Hawkins

Print this article Font size -16+

Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?

The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

The example was deliberately extreme as an illustration. But, in the real world, the same general pattern can be seen in local, state and national government responses to budget cuts. — Thomas Sowell

It’s the oldest trick in the book. When there is any sort of slow down in government spending, no fat, waste or fraud is ever targeted as a result. Instead, good people get hurt so greedy bureaucrats can loot every last penny from the taxpayers.

Cancer clinics across the country are turning away cancer patients over a 2 percent cut in funding. Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York said, “If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year. The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now.”

Certainly nobody should expect cancer clinics to lose money to treat patients. However, they’re turning cancer patients out in the street over a 2% cut and then demanding more money. They’re not cutting overhead. They’re not reducing their entertainment budgets. Their first choice for cost cutting is sticking it to people with cancer.

Because then, people will be naturally outraged by this and will demand that we give them more of our tax dollars.

Well, the American people should be outraged that cancer patients are being treated like this, but they should be furious at these sleazy oncology clinics and their allies in the Obama administration who are willing to treat these cancer patients like pawns to avoid making even the smallest cuts to government spending.