Anyone know if HCR changes Medicaid rates, in terms of what it pays MDs/hospitals?

[usregimechange]

Thanks,

[Ozymanithrax]

1. Yes, the bill will raise rates each year to bring them in line with what Medicare pays.

[sabrina 1]

2. I don't know about rates, but

the Medicaid funds will now go through the Private Insurance Industry who will take out their profits for 'managing' them before they get to the health care providers. This has already created problems because they hold up payment and keep the funds in their account for an average of 55 days.

[DFLforever]

3. That's how Medicare operates

payment through private companies

[cynatnite]

4. Those are called fiscal intermediaries...

This is not new at all.

[sabrina 1]

5. It may not be new, but it is completely unnecessary and not that

long ago, Medicaid paid health care providers directly with no intermediaries. I know several people, who I helped when volunteering at the hospital, who were on Medicaid. We did not deal with any Private Insurance industries. Payments were made directly to the hospital and doctors.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'new', I know that over the past several years Private Insurance has been inserting itself into publicly funded programs, and as a result, because of inefficiency and holding up of payments, many doctors have decided not to accept patients on Medicare.

I don't have time to provide links right now, but this has been an issue, although the scale so far is nothing compared to what it will be after this bill goes into effect.

Rather than increasing their access, Democrats should have stopped these failing, for-profit, corrupt organizations from ever being involved with public funding.

Medicare's overhead was just 3%. Allowing these middle-men to get involved has raised costs because they have to take their cut of these funds. The whole purpose of a Public Program is that it should be administered by the government, as it was intended.

Now they are after Public School funding also, and Bush's faith based programs funneled even more money into private hands.

So to say it's 'not new', may be true to an extent, depending on your definition of 'new', but I understood that it was Republicans who were the party pushing for the privatization of all of our public institutions, the Prison System etc. NOT Democrats and there is no way I would have supported this if I had known they were planning on out-doing Republicans in the privatization game.