President Barack Obama proposes to expand Medicaid to cover some uninsured Americans. Obviously, the expansion would involve taxpayers forking over a great deal of money, which would put more pressure on already cash-strapped states.
Arizona, for example, has the highest Medicaid rate in the country, and 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. Patients’ bills were reduced by 50 percent during the first two years of the experiment. (Source)
The Associated Press reports that Medicaid expansion would be much worse for high-poverty states. Republican governor of Mississippi Haley Barbour said, “If the federal government wants to expand health care to everybody in the country, they should not force the states to pay part of the bill. If they want to do that, the federal government should pay for it.”
Proponents of health care reform also want to lower the income threshold for eligibility.
Primary care physicians are feeling the pinch of rising health care costs. Some are implementing new “personal service” packages, where they reduce the number of patients they see and charge patients $2,000 annually for services like annual physicals, 24/7 access by phone and e-mail, same-day/next-day appointments, and a CD containing personal medical records.
CNN Money reports that some primary care physicians are taking down their shingles altogether.
“My malpractice insurance was $125,000 a year, and going up,” Dr. Tara Wah said. “The only way to get the extra money was to cut back on my salary.”
The article cites a survey of 12,000 primary care physicians in which 10.1 percent of respondents said they’d leave the profession in the next one to three years.
