The Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare takes over $600 million from Medicare to pay for the new health insurance plans. The funds are being taken from providers, doctors, lab & xray facilities, etc. which means providers will be paid less.
Since providers are being paid less for their services there has been a decrease nationally of providers accepting Medicare. Last year there was a 9% drop in Medicare providers with doctors either dropping out of Medicare or not taking new patients.
The Medicare Advantage program is also impacted since the law is attempting do reduce the number of participants and payments to providers.
If you have Medicare and currently have a doctor you may not see many changes in the near term.
Great question! Unfortunately the answer is still kind of fuzzy. Depending upon who you listen to, it is either the death of medicare, or its best friend. The Government gave states the option of adding medicare coverage for millions of seniors who fell into the cracks, and offered to pay for a significant portion of it. Some states added it, and there were seniors who were finally able to get medicare, other states had different ideology, and passed. A major focus of the Act was to trim overblown costs and waste by providers ( The savings in the waste recovery are to help fund the program, so there has been a big push for this) and make the charges more uniform across the industry. As a result, many providers either dropped or limited the services that they had previously provided. So there is a kind of "on one hand" answer so far to your question, and I guess it depends upon which side of the fence you sit as to whether it is helping or hurting. If your parent was able to finally get coverage, you would probably like it; if you are a provider ( or used a provider) who was making a tidy profit off of your medicare billing, who learns that won't be continuing, and drops the service, you probably don't. This will be a great debate for as long as it takes for solid numbers and data to shake out and really be able to measure the success or failure of the act. I appreciate the opportunity to answer, thanks for asking!
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Since providers are being paid less for their services there has been a decrease nationally of providers accepting Medicare. Last year there was a 9% drop in Medicare providers with doctors either dropping out of Medicare or not taking new patients.
The Medicare Advantage program is also impacted since the law is attempting do reduce the number of participants and payments to providers.
If you have Medicare and currently have a doctor you may not see many changes in the near term.