Docs Still Less Likely to Treat Medicaid Patients
Medicaid patients continue to be last in line when it comes to finding doctors willing to serve them.
At least that’s the conclusion drawn in a new analysis prepared by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission.
According to a presentation delivered at a MACPAC meeting last week:
- Doctors are less likely to accept new Medicaid patients (70.8 percent) than they are patients insured by Medicare (85.3 percent) or private insurers (90 percent), with a much greater differential in acceptance rates among specialists and psychiatrists.
- Pediatricians, general surgeons, and ob/gyns have a higher acceptance rate of Medicaid patients than physicians as a whole.
- Physicians in states with high managed care penetration rates are less likely (66.7 percent) to accept Medicaid patients than physicians in states with low managed care penetration (78.5 percent).
- There is no meaningful differential in acceptance rates among physicians in Medicaid expansion states and states that did not expand their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act.
- Physician acceptance rates have not changed since adoption of the Affordable Care Act in either Medicaid expansion nor non-Medicaid expansion states.
- The higher the ratio of Medicaid-to-Medicare physician payments in an individual state, the more likely that physicians in those states will accept Medicaid patients. The difference is especially great among general practitioners and ob/gyns.
Learn more from the MACPAC presentation “Physician Acceptance of New Medicaid Patients.”
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