And so it begins to unravel. The Mayo Clinic — “praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care” — stopped accepting Medicare patients as of January 1, “saying the U.S. government pays too little.”

But fear not. It will be different for “private” insurers operating under the command-and-control processes imposed by the beneficent bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services, who clearly will be driven by the preferences of patients rather than the demands of interest groups.

– Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.