There’re thrice the number of doctors compared to 3 years ago, who are refusing the Medicare patients, many citing increasing rules as well as lowered rates of payment of Medicare.
According to Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, that administers this program, even the doctors who see some of Medicare patients still, are limiting number of the Medicare patients that they treat.
Declines tend to be an addition to growing doctors’ number who wouldn’t accept the new patients under Medicaid, and come only when millions of the Americans happened to be poised for becoming eligible for the coverage under this program of Obamacare.
Number of doctors who are refusing both the Medicaid and Medicare payments wouldn’t completely undermine the Obamacare, according to health experts, but there are patients who might have problems in finding the doctors who would tend to accept their latest coverage under law of healthcare-reform.
According to Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, 9,539 of doctors who accepted payments of Medicare opted out from this program the previous year. This seems to be one large number, though 685000 doctors at national level got enrolled as the participating physicians of Medicare in 2012.
81% of them tended to be family doctors, drop from 83% during 2010.This month, however it was reported that 1/3rd of the physicians of primary-care didn’t accept the new patients of Medicaid during 2010-2011.
A part of this problem is rates of Medicare payment haven’t kept any pace with the inflation, and the Medicare reimbursements can be slashed till 25% the next year if Congress delays cuts. Also, the amount of information and paperwork required from the doctors as well as providers happens to be massive.
President of American Academy of Family Physicians, Jeffrey Cain, says, “Family physicians have been fed up for a long time and it’s getting worse.”
When the doctors fall out of the programs like Medicare and Medicaid, they could practice based upon patients’ needs rather than worrying about the rates of reimbursement, he said.