Medicaid payments to doctors will likely be targeted next year as an effort to save costs:
“No states like to cut provider payments,” Dr. Smith said. “But it is perhaps one of the first places states would turn to because it is a real savings.”
Idiocy. As always, the wonks take the short-sighted approach that will do nothing to save money.
Medicaid rates are already so low, it’s essentially charity care. As patients can tell you, finding doctors that take Medicaid is already an exercise in futility.
Cutting payments will lead to more physicians dropping Medicaid, forcing patients to go without care or to the emergency room.
That can only further raise, not lower, health care costs.
Related posts:
- California is cutting Medicaid payments
- How cutting Medicaid payments hurts patients
- New York joins the folly of cutting Medicaid payments
- Finding a doctor who accepts Medicaid
- Accepting Medicaid led to firing
- With Medicaid cuts looming, guess who’s supporting doctors?
- Cutting back on prescription drugs
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{ 5 comments }
Well, I suppose if people die sooner due to lack of care it might save money. Maybe that’s what the wonks were thinking?
Just got a Medicaid payment for hospital care on a Medicaid patient.
My fees are set by our best-paying insurance. The hospital care on this certain day was $165.
So the better private insurances would have paid that. Not-so-good insurances, ten or twenty less.
Our Medicaid paid $29
Twenty-nine dollars. That’s what they allowed.
And you wonder why docs don’t sign up. I tell patients, frankly anybody who asks. If I opened my practice to Medicaid I’d go bankrupt.
Even if I worked for free, I would not be able to pay the rent, utilities and pay staff on Medicaid payment.
seeing a medicaid patient in NY, in a nursing home, reimburses $7.
That's right, SEVEN BUCKS.
That's right, in 2008, seven dollars.
That's for someone who had a hemorrhagic stroke, now with peg feeds, trach care, ten meds, & twenty nursing orders.
For seven bucks, why do you bother? Why does anyone? You can’t cover travel for that.
…….suddenly feeling rich as Croesus with my twenty-nine bucks……
Well I don’t think any doctor ever sees anybody in a nursing home. So 7.00 sounds pretty good when you aren’t actually going there, just documenting that you are.
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