Mayo Clinic performance rating comes under scrutiny

The White House has praised the Mayo Clinic and other Midwest clinics for performance ratings, but critics argue that Mayo's low- to no-acceptance of Medicare/Medicaid skews the results.

Critics say the high scores in the Dartmouth College rankings do not reflect Mayo's refusal to accept Medicare for patients in its Arizona facility or that only five percent of patients in its flagship Minnesota facility are on Medicaid.

The clinics have collectively leveraged their high-performance rankings, critics say, to insert favorable language in healthcare legislation provisions to reward themselves with higher Medicare payments. The language would also punish facilities with low rankings--primarily in the South and in larger U.S. cities.

But healthcare analysts and those that would be adversely affected by the provisions, namely politicians and medical officers in affected states, are crying foul. They argue that low Medicare spending by Mayo does not indicate efficiencies in treatment practices but rather a lack of diversity and poverty in their patient populations.

To read more:
- see the Los Angeles Times story [1] 

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Investor-owned hospitals behind on quality [3]
Study: Hospital comparison sites confusing [4]