More than half of Medicaid doctors could not offer appointments to Medicaid enrollees, an investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services released on Tuesday revealed.
Despite states and the federal government spending nearly $460 billion on Medicaid in fiscal year 2013, the program has been plagued with access issues due to the fact that the it pays doctors at a low rate. The IG investigation was conducted in the summer and fall of 2013, before Obamacare added millions of additional beneficiaries to the health insurance program for low-income Americans.
According to the IG report, thirty-five percent of doctors listed as participating in Medicaid could not be found at the location listed by a given Medicaid plan. An additional eight percent of doctors were not participating in the plan, while another eight percent said they were not accepting new patients.
Those who could offer appointments had a median wait time of two weeks, but more than 25 percent of doctors required a wait of one month or more. One in 10 doctors required wait times over 2 months.
The study exposes two clear problems hurting Medicaid enrollees.
First, that it’s too difficult to find doctors who accept Medicaid.
Second, the doctors who do accept Medicaid are overburdened by too many patients.
Thanks to Obamacare, as many as 18 million more people may join Medicaid by 2018, which will only exacerbate these issues. Obamacare primarily focused on expanding access to health insurance for consumers without doing anything to increase the number of doctors ready to serve patients. As the number of enrollees grows, more doctors will choose to leave Medicaid plans to avoid being overburdened. The doctors that remain will only become more overwhelmed by new enrollees.
The report recommended three actions, all of which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agreed with. “We recommend that CMS work with States to (1) assess the number of providers offering appointments and improve the accuracy of plan information, (2) ensure that plans’ networks are adequate and meet the needs of their Medicaid managed care enrollees, and (3) ensure that plans are complying with existing State standards and assess whether additional standards are needed,” wrote inspector general Daniel Levinson.
But these changes wouldn’t fix more fundamental problems with the government-run program.
