Payments to Pennsylvania primary care physicians who serve Medicaid patients will fall 52.4 percent after the first of the year, when the Affordable Care Act’s two-year increase in those payments ends.
The temporary fee increase was included in the Affordable Care Act to encourage more primary care physicians to serve Medicaid patients in anticipation of the significant growth of Medicaid as a result of the reform law’s Medicaid expansion.  Under that law, Medicaid primary care fees were raised to the level of Medicare primary care rates for two years.  Nation-wide, the average Medicaid primary care fee will fall 42.8 percent.
So far, 15 states plan to use their own money to prevent the dramatic reduction of Medicaid primary care payments.  Pennsylvania is not among them.
The cut will be especially damaging to the state’s safety-net hospitals because they serve so many more Medicaid patients than the typical hospital and expect to serve even more such patients when the state’s Medicaid program expands beginning on January 1.
Learn more about the upcoming Medicaid payment cut in the new Urban Institute report Reversing the Medicaid Fee Bump:  How Much Could Medicaid Physician Fees for Primary Care Fall in 2015?, which you can find here, on the Urban Institute’s web site.