Patients on Medicare and Medicaid tend to utilize the health care system more frequently.
Combined with the fact that an increasing number of physicians are closing their doors to such patients, the so-called “safety net” clinics and hospitals are finding themselves with much more work than they can handle.
In this case in California, one such clinic was seriously considering shutting its doors to Medicare.
A physician assistant who works at the clinic is fed up with the number of doctors shunting these patients to them, saying, “Who’s going to see your neighbor while you’re telling them you won’t see them?”
This goes to show that universal coverage only works if doctors accept all insurances, and certainly does not guarantee access to medical care.
Just ask anyone on Medicaid and Medicare, who often end up going to the hospital, making the emergency department look more “like a nursing home.”
Related posts:
- Accepting Medicaid led to firing
- When Medicare and Medicaid are your best payers
- This is your reward for continuing to take Medicaid patients
- California is cutting Medicaid payments
- Refusing flu shots; Ascending cholangitis; Hospitals cherry-picking; Pfizer goes generic; Stroke in a 32-year old; Medicare for all inevitable?
- Coverage without access
- Once you hit Medicare age, good luck finding a primary care doctor
{ 5 comments }
Atlas Shrugs.
This is a big problem
I do not know of any physician colleagues who went into medicine to NOT take care of people.
It is bad enough how private insurance treats those of us in primary care.
However, the “safety net”, ie medicare and medicaid is outright abusive when it comes to primary care.
Although recently increased to, I think, 37 dollars, the reimbursement from New York State medicaid for a 99213 was barely 30 dollars for many years. And to make matters worse, it takes an average 120 days to get that money.
It is outright obscene.
A FAMILY PRACTITIONER
If physicians refuse to accept substandard payment for their services, and patients who can’t find doctors get frustrated, and complaints go to legislators and media outlets write articles about it, maybe payment levels will increase to appropriate levels to address the increasing public outrage.
Imagine that.
Or we could just pass a law forcing docs to take medicare/medicaid and watch physicians stop taking insurance completely. Don’t think that helps things much.
So the employed PA thinks it’s terrible.
It’s easy to be sanctimonious when you have a steady paycheck from a clinic that is subsidized by profits from elsewhere in the medical center or from direct subsidies from the feds.
Maybe this PA should invest his or her savings in a small business and see what happens with a large percentage of money losing accounts.
Boulder community that only serves medicare patients had to close last month.
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