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Does Mayo Clinic take Medicare?
Visiting Mayo Clinic | Last Active: Mar 19 12:45am | Replies (122)Comment receiving replies
I called the Mayo clinic today and still was denied scheduling an appointment, however , the woman said because they are contracted with Medicare we cannot offer self pay to you with an advantage plan. I guess that's the federal law the first woman was trying to tell me. I said what if I was uninsured, or insured and didn't want to use my insurance and wanted to self pay? Her answer to that was, we would know by your age that you would have some kind of coverage and they only accepted Medicare. If they couldn't pull up our information under Medicare they would know we had an advantage plan , and they only have a contract with Medicare. The woman kept talking to me like I was kindergartner! I kept telling her that I understood what she was saying. What I could not understand is why they would turn away a patient, a patient that was willing to pay out of pocket. Why are they turning away money??
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@raygregvic This isn't a problem just at Mayo; you'll run into this anywhere at providers who are not in your insurance network. They have to accept lower payments from Medicare. Medicare has a deductible and once that is met, the patient no longer pays out of pocket when there is a Medigap plan. Medicare determines what the acceptable fees are, and usually these are lower than with private insurance. The Medigap plans cover what Medicare doesn't. Medicare "advantage" plans promise all kind of perks to get people to sign up for them, but they are not as widely accepted as real Medicare. My PT has told me that the "advantage" insurance scrutinizes everything they pay for, even years later, and then can come back to providers and can take the money back. The providers waste excessive administrative time providing records and then are stuck working for free and can't pay their operating costs. I do not blame providers for not wanting to accept these plans. HMO plans dictate that they will only pay for providers in their network and they control your choices. The plan that is portable to every state is real Medicare. It might be worth considering changing to real Medicare next time during the enrollment time. I'm sorry it didn't work out for you. I had a friend who was seen at Mayo and had surgery scheduled, and then the "advantage" plan would not pay for surgery and they picked out a surgeon somewhere else and told the patient that is all they would cover. She had no choice what so ever. She has switched to real medicare now. Before I chose my Medigap plan to go with Medicare, I called Mayo billing to know what plans they accept.