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Study finds decrease in physicians’ willingness to accept patients with insurance

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Tara F. Bishop

A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine has found that since 2005, physicians have been accepting fewer patients with health insurance.

“Given the medical profession’s widely reported dissatisfaction with Medicare, we expected to find hard evidence that Medicare patients were being turned away,” stated study author Tara F. Bishop, MD, in a Weill Cornell Medical College press release. “Instead, we saw only a modest decline in doctors’ acceptance of patients on Medicare. The survey data showed a more significant decline in their acceptance of patients with private insurance.”

Weill and her fellow investigators examined survey data from a national survey run by the Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics. They reportedly found a “modest drop in acceptance of Medicare patients,” from 95.5% in 2005 to 92.9% in 2008. Physicians also reportedly turned increasing numbers of Medicaid patients away during the same 4-year period, which the authors noted could be attributed to Medicaid’s historically low reimbursement rates.

Still, the authors noted in the release, the most surprising decline was found in physicians’ acceptance of new patients with private insurance: Acceptance rates for patients with traditional fee-for-service private insurance dropped from 93.3% in 2005 to 87.8% in 2008.

Bishop and her co-authors suggested the change could relate to two factors: Inadequate reimbursement levels that have failed to keep pace with medical practice expenditures, and the administrative issues that tend to be associated with private health insurance.

“At a moment when the country is poised to achieve near-universal coverage, patients’ access to care could be a casualty of the collision between the medical profession and the insurance industry,” Bishop stated in the release. “Consumers and health advocacy groups, too, should be aware of these early warning signs so they can work to ensure access to quality medical care.”

Reference:

• Bishop TF, Federman AD, Keyhani S. Declines in physician acceptance of Medicare and private coverage. Arch Intern Med. 2011. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.251
• www.nyp.org

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