subject: The Primary Care Physician and Health Care Reform—How it Will Affect You [print this page] The new health care reform legislation includes a lot of provisions that are going to affect your bottom lineand it looks like a lot of those effects are going to be negative.
For one thing, while the reform does include increased Medicaid reimbursements, those increases are only mandated for 2013 and 2014, when the bulk of the expected new patients are being added. No one knows what will happen after that, but we already do know that Congress is notorious for under-funding Medicaid.
At the same time, you're going to be expected to see a lot of new patients as a result of health care reform. Experts say that approximately 32 million new patients will be seeking care, and roughly 16 million of them will use Medicaid to get that care. This means that you can expect to see your own practice increase by as much as 10%-20%.
As a former medical sales representative specializing in primary care practices, I know what this will mean for you. Most of the physicians I visited were already seeing more than 100 patients a week. I don't want to think how hard it is going to be on you to see another 10 or 20 courtesy of health care reform.
What can you do as a primary care physician to protect your wealth and your sanity under such conditions? One thing, of course, is to do what you can to make your voice heard as health care is being further reformed.
Make sure your state and national representatives know that you can't afford to see patients on Medicaid at a loss, as you're doing now, and that the government is currently only paying you about 60%70% of the actual cost of seeing Medicare patients.
Maybe the health care system needed to be reformed, but you have a right to ask if you, as a primary care physician, are supposed to be the one paying through longer work hours for the same or less money.
Another thing you can and need to do is take over managing your own wealth. Health care reform and the proven incompetence of the financial services sector make it more important than ever that you know how to make your money work for you. In fact, as the changes mandated by the reform legislation come to pass, managing your own wealth may be the only way to guarantee yourself the retirement you deserve.
Fortunately, there are systems out there that you can use to protect your earnings and your retirement, even in the face of health care reform. Things are going to be very challenging for a while for primary care physicians. The government and private insurers are both going to be looking for ways to save money, and we all know that frequently means squeezing primary care physicians.
But with the right combination of information and commitment, you can learn to manage and grow your wealth so that health care reform doesn't cheat you out of theretirement lifestyle you deserve.
The Primary Care Physician and Health Care ReformHow it Will Affect You
