Last month we wrote about how some primary care physicians are dealing with the growing costs of health care by charging fees to provide personalized, or concierge, care. These efforts involve reducing the number of patients and charging remaining patients about $2,000 a year for services that include annual physicals, 24/7 access by phone and e-mail, same-day/next-day appointments, and a CD containing personal medical information.
The Kaiser Network rounds up links to news articles about the problem. Arizona, for example, covers about one of every five residents under Medicaid. Under the U.S. House of Representatives’s version of President Obama’s health care reform bill, 11 million more Americans would receive Medicaid coverage at a cost of $438 billion over 10 years. The federal government would fund the program 100 percent through 2014. Arizona, which has the highest Medicaid rate in the country, would face a “financial tsunami” under Obama’s plan.
Florida has seen money-saving results when it moved thousands of Medicaid patients into private managed care plans. According to the article, patients’ bills were reduced by 50 percent during the first two years of the experiment.
California, which has faced budget problems for years, is trying to protect patients in managed health care plans by mandating shorter waiting periods for non-urgent primary care and specialist appointments. About 19 million Californians are in managed health care programs.
