- Doctors face big cuts in Medicaid pay, By Phil Galewitz, January 4, 2015, USA Today: “Andy Pasternak, a family doctor in Reno, saw more than 100 new Medicaid patients last year after the state expanded the insurance program for the poor under the Affordable Care Act. But he won’t be taking any new ones this year. That’s because the law’s two-year pay raise for primary care doctors like him who see Medicaid patients expired Wednesday, resulting in fee reductions of 43% on average across the country, according to the non-partisan Urban Institute…”
- As Medicaid rolls swell, fees to doctors return to lower rate, By Laura Olson, December 31, 2014, Allentown Morning Call: “With some 600,000 Pennsylvanians newly eligible for the state’s expanding Medicaid program, the doctors who provide care through that program for low-income residents are getting some bad news: their fees are going down. Those payments were hiked two years ago as part of the federal Affordable Care Act in an effort to encourage more physicians to treat Medicaid patients. The lower Medicaid payments were brought up to match the higher rates for Medicare, with the federal government covering the cost…”
- No plans for California to make up for expiring ‘Medicaid fee bump’, By Eryn Brown, December 31, 2014, Los Angeles Times: “California officials have no plans to make up for an expiring federal pay incentive designed to entice doctors to treat low-income patients. The end of the subsidy with the start of the new year could result in steep pay cuts for many doctors participating in the Medicaid system for needy Californians. An analysis of the pay cut’s expiration by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., calculated that California doctors’ fees would drop 58.8% when the subsidy disappears…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty