Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

Trump Shift, Backed by States, Fuels Fear of Too Few Medicaid Docs

Stateline: The Trump administration wants to drop an Obama-era rule designed to ensure that there are enough doctors to care for Medicaid patients.

State health officials say the rule, which requires states to monitor whether Medicaid reimbursement rates are high enough to keep doctors in the program, forces them to spend a lot of time collecting and analyzing data with little benefit. Health care advocates, though, fear that dropping the regulation would enable states to set those payments at a level that would cause some of the 72 million Americans who rely on Medicaid to scramble for health care. Research shows that when reimbursement rates drop, fewer providers agree to accept low-income Medicaid patients.

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