Further reimbursement cuts:
The irony, Michaud said, is many doctors in private practice won’t take new Medicaid patients because their reimbursement is so low, and now the state is about to penalize the hospital-based physicians practices that do see them.
When will the government learn that cutting physician reimbursement rates is the worst way to control costs? This will simply lead to more doctors not accepting Medicaid, worsening access. And with a fee-for-service system, there will also be more pressure to increase the number of services, paradoxically increasing health care costs. Idiots.
Related posts:
- The idiocy of cutting physician reimbursements
- Cutting Medicaid payments
- What happens if the safety net clinics start refusing to see Medicare or Medicaid patients?
- How cutting Medicaid payments hurts patients
- With Medicaid cuts looming, guess who’s supporting doctors?
- Medicaid and tamper-resistant prescriptions
- New York joins the folly of cutting Medicaid payments
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{ 3 comments }
Mainecare is a mess. They have one of the highest per capita enrollments in Medicaid (around 20% of the population) and very low reimbursement, even by Medicaid standards. They have promised so much to so many people without enough money to pay for it all. They’re going after the hospitals because they’re forced to accept Mainecare and because the private docs are going out of business or dropping Mainecare.
Gripes aren’t worth much unless enough people are willing to make the credible threat to quit medicare, then reaffirm the credibility by following through.
Cutting Medicaid payments to outpatient services, which has been done in various ways by several states results in more physicians dropping out of Medicaid participation. Outpatient practitioners don’t lose anything by turning away patients who always lose their practices money. Better not to see them at all.
Correctly and cynically, the state Medicaid agency managers have calculated that hospital-based physicians don’t have the same latitude of response; they can’t just boot out Medicaid patients who have been admitted. If those doctors are on salary, the hospital eats the loss; if the doctors are on fee-for service, the doctor eats the loss. Unless he quits working at the hospital, there is no way he can get out from under Medicaid.
Hideous but brilliant.
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