The recently enacted healthcare reform legislation aims to lower costs and provide insurance coverage for more than 30 million people, many of them through Medicaid, but it does not take into account growing shortages of primary care physicians choosing these alternative models because of higher workloads, lower reimbursements and gaps in pay relative to specialists, according to the report.
A 2009 survey by the American Academy of Family Physicians showed 42 percent of general practitioners were not accepting new Medicaid patients.
Read The Fiscal Times‘ report on the growth of retainer-based medicine.
