Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Having health insurance is great. It largely protects people against financial losses that accrue when you become ill. It provides coverage for medical services. And improves patients health. Well, that last one is only true if health insurance allows you to access care. When health insurance provider reimbursement is low as is the case for…
When you buy a typical product, the vendor does its best to make the purchasing process as easy as possible. There is a reason for this, clearly; they want your business. State and federal governments, however, have no such incentive. In fact, oftentimes reducing the number of people using government services saves money. Thus, it…
The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is a federal program that provides matching funds to states in order for them to provide health insurance to children. The program was designed to cover uninsured children in families with incomes that are modest but too high to qualify for Medicaid. Currently, however, the program is in jeopardy. In fact, federal funding for…
A new paper by Sharma et al. (2017) finds that Medicaid patients living in states with lower Medicaid reimbursement have more challenges accessing primary care services. We found that states with higher Medicaid fees had higher probabilities of appointment offers and shorter wait times for Medicaid patients, and lower probabilities of appointment offers and longer…
In general the answer is yes, but often with some difficulty. AJMC recaps the findings from a the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) Quick Stats section from July 21, 2017. 88.9% of primary care physicians said they are accepting new patients, based on 2015 data from the National Electronic Health Records Survey. However,…
In short, the reason is that Medicaid reimbursement rates for providers is too low. Saurabh Jha, however, explains the point a bit more artistically in his Health Care Blog piece. Medicaid pays a cardiologist, with years of training, $25-40 for a consultation to manage a complex patient with multiple comorbidities, on polypharmacy, where the cardiologist…
The Senate’s new health care bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, proposes a number of changes to the Affordable Care Act. The Kaiser Family Foundation has a detailed breakdown of the bill and compares it with the Affordable Care Act that President Obama passed and the American Health Care Act that was proposed…
One of the primary changes in the healthcare system directed by the Affordable Care Act was providing funding for states to expand Medicaid. Many states did so; many others did not. Some states expanded Medicaid but put additional hurdles in front of beneficiaries to receive this coverage at no cost. Consider the case of the State of Iowa.…
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) 2017 Long-Term Budget Outlook, you need to look no further than entitlements for the elderly. Mandatory programs have accounted for a rising share of the federal government’s noninterest spending over the past few decades, exceeding 60 percent for the past several years. Much of the growth has occurred because…
The Congressional Budget Office provides some gloomy news on the fiscal health of the federal government in their recent 2016 Long Term Budget Outlook. They state: If current laws governing taxes and spending did not change, the United States would face steadily increasing federal budget deficits and debt over the next 30 years, according to projections…