Two Democratic senators introduced a bill Thursday that would boost Medicaid provider reimbursement rates back to Medicare levels — part of an Obamacare provision that was supposed to be temporary.
The health care law upped Medicaid reimbursement rates for primary care doctors to Medicare levels for 2013 and 2014 alone. The bump ended Dec. 31, bringing Medicaid back down to its typical level — putting traditional Medicaid patients, and the almost 10 million Medicaid expansion patients, at risk of losing their doctors.
Because Medicaid pays health care providers some of the lowest rates around, many physicians opt not to accept the coverage at all. In 2012, before Obamacare temporarily hiked provider fees, health care staffing firm Jackson Healthcare reported that over a third of physicians were refusing to take to Medicaid patients due to falling reimbursements.
Experts worry that the trend will continue now that the two-year boost has ended. The Urban Institute found in December that primary care providers were facing an effective pay cut of 43 percent for Medicaid patients come 2015, which could take a hit at the ability to access care for the millions of Americans have been put on Medicaid through Obamacare.
Senators Patty Murray and Sherrod Brown want to boost the provider rates once again.
“Primary care providers represent a critical access point for women and families,” Brown said in a statement. “We should be making it easier for providers to accept new Medicaid patients, not harder. Expanding access to care is at the heart of the health law — and today millions more Americans have care through Medicaid.”
Democrats have protested the end of the temporary increase and President Obama requested a one-year extension in his 2014 budget proposal, but so far nothing has come of an extension. Increasing the provider rates past the two years stipulated by the Affordable Care Act would likely drastically increase the cost of the Medicaid program to taxpayers.
“To make sure our health care system works for patients and families, we need to ensure that when a person get sick [sic], they are able to get the care they need, when and where they need it,” Murray added. “By aligning Medicaid reimbursements with Medicare rates…we can build on the progress made in the Affordable Care Act, continue expanding access to primary care, and help women and families across the country stay healthy and economically secure.”
In Dec. 2014, after several years of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, over one in five Americans — almost 70 million in all — are on the program’s rolls.
Murray and Brown noted that paying physicians more under Medicaid increases patients’ ability to make appointments. They argued that their bill “would improve the efficiency of Medicaid dollars” by offering higher rates to primary care providers in more settings, cutting down on patients using the emergency room as for primary care needs.
Under traditional Medicaid programs, that has been a serious problem. A pivotal Harvard study of Oregon’s 2008 Medicaid expansion found that Medicaid patients actually used the emergency room significantly more often than even the uninsured — including a more significant use of the ER for primary care issues. (RELATED: Harvard Study: Medicaid Actually Increases ER Visits)