Cleveland Clinic Threatens To Lay Off Thousands To Prepare For ObamaCare; Will Offer Early Retirment To Thousands

This was posted earlier from another source, but Bloomberg spells it out, exactly how bad this trainwreck is going to be.

The Cleveland Clinic, one of the world’s foremost medical and research centers, is cutting costs and trimming its $6 billion annual budget as patients and providers grapple with health care changes in the U.S.

The clinic plans to shave 5.5 percent from its yearly spending by tightening operations budgets for things like travel, filling vacancies only where necessary and combining services in areas where there are overlapping offerings, said spokeswoman Eileen Sheil. The clinic will offer early retirement to 3,000 employees and may cut jobs if it can’t otherwise reach $330 million in savings for 2014, she said.

The move is designed to help the clinic and its patients prepare for the Affordable Care Act, the $1.3 trillion overhaul passed by Congress in 2010 that’s intended to extend insurance coverage to the nation’s 50 million uninsured citizens. Online health insurance exchanges are slated to open in October, and the overhaul is expected to increase the number of people on Medicaid, the government’s insurance program for the poor.

“We’re seeing a rise in overall health care costs across the country, and the Cleveland Clinic is trying to be proactive,” Sheil said in a telephone interview. “We have to make health care more affordable to patients because the costs are going to fall more on them in the future.”

This is quite fascinating: this is the second time a major news organization refers to ObamaCare as the Affordable Care Act (focusing on the irony of it all) and clipping off the first half of the act's name: "Patient Protection." That went out the window a long time ago. 

This is also quite fascinating: all the strides that American workers have made in 100 years -- women's rights; equal pay for equal work; two-income families; union benefits; etc. could becoming undone by ObamaCare. I think folks are finally realizing this is much more than just health care that is being affected. It is the entire American work pattern: less hours; shifting/eliminating benefits; more part-time; less full-time; more outsourcing; more contracting; etc.

But within the healthcare industry: women make up the majority of employees (nurses, home health care). Some of the highest-paid two income families would be in the health sector, and now that, too, could be coming to an end.

The unions are going to have to run four times as fast just to keep the gains they have made in the service industries like healthcare. Wow, talk about the Red Queen effect. 

Even Warren Buffett now realizes his support for the program was misplaced. Oh, well, we all make mistakes.

(The interesting thing: I still think individual investors will do very well with ObamaCare; see earlier posts. I think Warren Buffett will do just fine. His companies will find a way to get around ObamaCare just as Walgreen Company has.)