Half the Newly-Insured Under ObamaCare are Headed for Medicaid
As she began a punishing regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, Mrs. Vliet found a measure of comfort in her monthly appointments with her primary care physician, Dr. Saed J. Sahouri, who had been monitoring her health for nearly two years.
She was devastated, therefore, when Dr. Sahouri informed her a few months later that he could no longer see her because, like a growing number of doctors, he had stopped taking patients with Medicaid.
Dr. Sahouri said that his reimbursements from Medicaid were so low — often no more than $25 per office visit — that he was losing money every time a patient walked in his exam room.
Full article on shrinking Medicaid payments.
There will be 16 million more patients just like this. They won’t be able to find doctors outside of emergency rooms and at the emergency rooms there will be long waits for care as access is rationed by waiting.
Meanwhile, Obama and the Congressional Democrats will be saying how great it is that all these people are insured.
It’s ironic considering that Medicare and Medicaid are supposed to be social safety nets. Apparently it’s more acceptable to be elderly than to be poor (since Medicare reimburses at a higher rate). Tell me, if the poor voted in the same numbers are the elderly, would you still see a discrepancy in pricing?
Walgreens has already stopped filling prescriptions for new Medicaid patients in Washington State due to low reimbursements.
People currently on Medicaid are generally limited to getting their care at section 330 clinics because they will take Medicaid patients due to federal laws requireing much higher reimbursements for them than for than private physicians. Most of those clinics are affiliated with hospitals or are federally qualified health centers. This will likely be the wave of the future for people stuck in Medicare, in the Medicaid expansions, or the publicly run “private” exchange insurance plans.
This is what health care rationing looks like. It doesn’t knock on your door and announce itself. it creeps up on you.
I thought that the new healthcare bill was going to bring parity between medicaid and medicare reimbursement rates. That’s the one (and only) thing I liked about it.
The average physician only derives 17% of their revenue from Medicaid patients. Nearly half of physicians (47.4%) either accept no new Medicaid patients or only accepts the occasional new Medicaid patient. If a flood of new Medicaid eligible patients show up on physicians’ office doorstep, I expect the proportion of doctors that decline Medicaid will rise since physicians cannot risk loading their practice with money-losing patients that could crowd out profitable ones.