Mayo Clinic Influences When it comes to healthcare, it would be nice if economic and other exterior influences did not put pressure on things like quality of care and so forth. However, the propensity for politicians to squabble, the regulations and mandates that come through and the affordability dilemma that many people face, this is basically impossible with healthcare. While reputable and ethically rich organizations like the Mayo Clinic may try to stay away from this and they often do, they are certainly not immune to this phenomenon. Indeed, they have to worry about things like national and world economic issues, the sustainability of the current organizational care models, healthcare reform and the litany of healthcare regulations that are added, changed or even removed as the months and years go on. While the Mayo Clinic is at its own standard in many ways, there are still some issues and pitfalls that they must address as part of doing their job.

Analysis

The Mayo Clinic stands, like other institutions, has been greatly impacted by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the various other pieces of legislation that come from the federal government and address issues of medical care, specialized medicine and payment plans. Prior pieces of legislation that have come across in recent months and years would be the updates and changes to Medicare, HIPAA and a few others. As the Mayo Clinic continues to implement new and advanced technologies and services like telemedicine, it pushes and lobbies for Congress to include these services within the basic scope of federally funded programs like Medicaid, the national program to provide healthcare services at an affordable rate to people with little to no income but that yet have healthcare needs that need to be addressed (Hiers, 2015). Given the lobbying and other efforts of the Mayo Clinic, they are at the forefront of the Great Recession is purported to have ended. These economic troubles would further weigh on the ability of the Clinic to continue to operate. This is because it depends on privately funded donations as well as revenue backed by federally funded programs. Indeed, those federal funds could dry up if the economy falters and/or the budget of the government shift to other endeavors such as extension of unemployment and other social services and programs, such as they tend to do in the wake of a recession or other weak economic activity. To state the obvious, this could prove detrimental to the operations of the Clinic. If demand for services drops off like it did after the housing and credit busts in 2008, Mayo Clinic may once again find its balance sheet in a state of shock (Evans, 2012).
Given all of that, it is clear that the United States and world economies faltering could very well thus have a negative impact on the Mayo Clinic if those economies continue to teeter and threaten to collapse. Several indicators suggest that economy has not revived in the way that many hoped it would. Beyond that, intervention from the Fed and other central banking institutions can only do so much and/or can end up being counter-productive in the long run. As such, a collapse appears to be unavoidable at this point, at least to many. Indeed, with the United Kingdom having voted to depart from the European Union, this could indeed throw another proverbial…