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.”