Kansas Health

[Kevin Freking, "Doctors taking less Medicaid patients," Associated Press, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 16 August 2006.]

A new study shows that low reimbursement rates are serving to discourage physicians from accepting Medicaid patients:

Many people who rely on government health insurance for the poor have to search harder to find a doctor and increasingly are going to large practices, a study shows.

Officials say Medicaid's reimbursement rate is the biggest reason that it is getting more difficult to locate doctors who take new patients under the program. On average, reimbursements are 69 percent of what Medicare pays and even lower compared with what private insurers pay.

Doctors frequently complain about the administrative hassles. For example, physicians often have to get approval before prescribing medicine or conducting tests.

Overall, the percentage of physicians not accepting new Medicaid patients has risen from about 19.5 in the mid-1990s to about 21 over the past few years. The change was much more pronounced among solo and small group practices.

Such "rationing" is the often unspoken method for controlling costs in government-run programs. According to Michael Bond in his Flint Hills Center study "Reforming Medicaid in Kansas: A Market-Based Approach":

Health care is very complicated and no bureaucracy can effectively design a rationing system to control usage in a manner that contains costs while preventing negative health outcomes.

Bond suggests that state officials work instead to empower Medicaid beneficiaries with accounts they can use to act as genuine consumers in the marketplace.

[Michael Bond, "What's wrong with Medicaid in Kansas?," The Flint Hills Center, 26 December 2005.]