{"id":187333,"date":"2013-04-04T19:12:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-05T00:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/04\/04\/yeah-the-sequester-is-benign\/"},"modified":"2013-04-04T19:12:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-05T00:12:00","slug":"yeah-the-sequester-is-benign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/04\/04\/yeah-the-sequester-is-benign\/","title":{"rendered":"Yeah, the Sequester is Benign\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s why <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/wonkblog\/wp\/2013\/04\/03\/cancer-clinics-are-turning-away-thousands-of-medicare-patients-blame-the-sequester\/\">cancer clinics are unable to treat thousands of patients<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">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.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cIf we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we\u2019d be out of business in six months to a year,\u201d said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. \u201cThe drugs we\u2019re going to lose money on we\u2019re not going to administer right now.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The care will likely be more expensive: One study from actuarial firm Milliman found that chemotherapy delivered in a hospital setting costs the federal government an average of $6,500 more annually than care delivered in a community clinic.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Those costs can trickle down to patients, who are responsible for picking up a certain amount of the medical bills. Milliman found that Medicare patients ended up with an average of $650 more in out-of-pocket costs when they were seen only in a hospital setting.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, not only are we going to kill grandma, it&#8217;s going to cost us more money to do so.<\/p>\n<p>Well, anything to make Grover Norquist happy, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s why cancer clinics are unable to treat thousands of patients: 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 &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,1020,1150,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-legislation","category-public-health","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187333"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}