Remember How ObamaCare Insures the Uninsured
About half of the newly insured will be in Medicaid. Here is the California Health Care Foundation’s survey of California Medicaid patients, as summarized by Chris Jacobs:
- More than two in five (42%) California adults in Medicaid had difficulty getting an appointment with a specialist, compared to 24% with private coverage.
- Nearly half (47%) of all beneficiaries in poor health said it was difficult to find specialists accepting their insurance—a rate more than twice as high as those adults with other health coverage (23%).
- More than one-third (34%) of all California Medicaid enrollees in excellent, very good, or good health were forced to make a trip to the emergency room in the past 12 months, compared to just 14% of those with other coverage.
- More than half (55%) of all Medicaid enrollees in fair or poor health visited the emergency room at least once in the past year, compared to only one-quarter (25%) of those in poor health with other coverage.
With that many people on Medicaid, people interested in medicine will be increasingly less likely to become doctors.
Wow, these are really bad numbers.
The Affordable Care Act will insure something like 32 million additional people — half on Medicaid. This will increase the number of Medicaid enrollees by about half. In addition, Medicare is slated to cut physician fees by nearly one-third. This suggests that patients with public coverage will increasingly find it difficult to locate doctors willing to treat them. In the past, physicians often treated Medicare enrollees, and a few Medicaid enrollees, as a humanitarian gesture. Once the fees earned from seeing Medicare enrollees falls below Medicaid fee levels, and the number of Medicaid enrollees swells, doctors will probably switch their practice to concierge models where they only see patients who are willing to pay a retainer. At this point, we will have a 2-tiered health care system with a huge void between the two tiers.