The idiocy of cutting physician payments continues:
There is now a proposal to cut a whopping 10 percent from Medi-Cal payments to health care providers in California. This poses an enormous threat to our neediest families’ medical care.These huge Medi-Cal reductions are supposed to help balance the state budget. But at what cost? Cutting Medi-Cal threatens to limit Medi-Cal patients’ access to physicians. It’s also likely to drive up the cost of health care for everyone else and cause the state to lose more than $1 billion in federal funds.
Doctors are not hurt in this scenario. The can simply stop taking Medi-Cal. Patients will be the real losers.
Related posts:
- Medicare cuts, Monday update
- Op-ed: Doctors’ pay cuts save little in health costs
- Medicare cuts: A 6-month stay of execution
- Cuts in physician payment = patients lose
- Single-payer supporters, be careful what you wish for
- Medicare cuts, D-day is upon us
- Declining reimbursements and you
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Why is it that people always assume doctors can hike up the fees to paying customers when Medicaid or Medicare cuts reimbursement? In a free-market, yes, but being a practicing physician isn’t a free market except for a very select few. Insurance companies and HMOs will usually tell you how much they will reimburse unless you are a large multigroup practice with leverage. It’s rare for the physician to hike up fees in response to medicaid cuts and expect those higher fees to actually materialized (except for cash paying customers). The only reasonable alternatives is to stop seeing Medicaid/Medicare patients.
Good thing the 2% tax on doctors didn’t go through in California as originally proposed
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