Medicare beneficiaries can't find doctors. Is that bad news?

I hope no one will call me for piling on if I follow Leigh Ann's entry about the 2007 PQRI mess with another on Medicare woes, but I'm struck by the recent flurry of stories about Medicare beneficiaries having a hard time finding doctors who are accepting new Medicare patients. Monday's Washington Post Story may be the one with the highest profile. It cites the report that probably stimulated most of the coverage:

While statistics are not available for the D.C. region, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reported last week that nearly 30 percent of the 2.6 million Medicare beneficiaries seeking a new primary care physician between September 2007 and October 2008 had trouble finding one, up from 25 percent in 2005. To encourage primary care doctors to accept new Medicare patients, the commission recommended to Congress in June that it increase payments to those practitioners by redistributing payments for specialized care.

But the Post story about Northern Virginia has company across the country – for instance in Southern Utah (the Spectrum & Daily News), Oklahoma (The Oklahoman), and as far away as Fairbanks, Alaska (the Daily News - Miner).

Then, of course, there's Massachusetts, where the shortage of primary care physicians willing to take new Medicare patients is just part of the problem. An NPR story highlighted the Mass. mess a week or two ago.

Stories like these are replete with anecdotes of patients calling practice after practice looking fruitlessly for a doctor, getting regular care from the emergency department, and so on, but they also share what seems to be a growing awareness of the underlying problem: that primary care physicians are underpaid, overworked and fed up. In fact, it's hard to avoid the sense that the light is dawning across the country – that people are coming to realize that universal coverage won't solve anything without universal primary care, and that to get more primary care physicians, we may need to work them less, pay them more, and let them do their jobs. Wouldn't that be nice?

Posted at 03:48PM Dec 12, 2008 by Bob Edsall  |  Comments[2]