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Higher Medicaid reimbursement linked to appointment availability

Increased Medicaid reimbursement to primary care providers is associated with improved appointment availability for Medicaid enrollees, according to a recently published study.

“Our findings suggest that providing higher Medicaid payments is an effective strategy for ensuring access to enrollees among already participating primary care providers. Whether the costs and benefits of the policy warrant ongoing federal or state investment will need to be determined,” Daniel Polsky, PhD, of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues wrote.

Researchers placed phone calls to primary care offices in 10 different states to assess the availability of and waiting times for appointments during two periods from November 2012 to March 2013 and May 2014 to July 2014. Trained field staff posed as either Medicaid enrollees or privately insured enrollees seeking new-patient appointments.

Results demonstrated that between the two time periods, the availability of primary care appointments in the Medicaid group increased from 58.7% before reimbursements increased to 66.4% in the second time period.

States with the biggest increases in reimbursements typically had the largest increases in appointment availability, with an estimated 1.25 percentage point increase in availability per 10% increase in reimbursement (P=.03). 

“We found strong evidence that providers who were already participating in a Medicaid plan in 2012 were more willing to schedule an appointment with a new Medicaid patient in 2014,” Polsky and colleagues wrote.

Disclosure: The researchers report receiving a grant for the study from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. See the study for a full list of the researchers’ relevant financial disclosures.