Posted by Vicki Stephenson on March 06, 2001 at 12:55:54:
I have a question, in Idaho we are finding it increasingly difficult to find good qualified Doctors that accept medicaid patients in their private practice due to low reimbersement rates, not receiving reimbersment for services in a goodly timely fashion, and having to resubmit reimbursement claims because they have lost or misplaced the other or lack of "reasonable" auditing system which is very costly to private practice, Timely review of submitted forms to become a qualified Doctor who is able to accept medicaid patients (again having to resubmit paper work, due to the inablity to locate such). Often times these Doctors are small business persons and do not have a large firm behind them to keep them running until the payments come in, they have to pay their staff and monthly expenses in a timely fashion and I think the government should not be holding up their reimbursements sometimes forcing these doctors to limit or just not accept medicaid patients. My question is: Should the planning councils start working on this issue at this time? In Idaho, particularly, we do not have an unlimited resource of psychiatric doctors, psychologist, therapist, etc. If we want quality mental health care for all shouldn't we start speking out on this subject?