Gipper,This is the fault of government. Their failure to properly manage and control the program allows people to abuse it.It’s actually worse than that, my spouse works at a health care provider and the problems that they are having with Medicaid patients overconsumption of service are causing massive problems with their practice. They routinely schedule appointments and don’t show, they schedule appointments and show up not for treatment but just expecting prescriptions, they refuse to follow treatment plans, they abuse the system in every way possible. Of course that doesn’t mean that all Medicaid patients are like that but it’s reached such epidemic proportions that it’s costing too much money and causing problems seeing other patients that the practice is considering just dropping their contracts with Medicaid, they can’t afford it anymore and it’s negatively impacting all the other private insurance and Medicare patients.That's really quite incredible. Less than 150M working people out of 330M have to pay for their own health care and also these 80M others' health care.In the richest nation on earth. That’s a lot of poor suffering Americans.
What a great country!
Pandemic Swells Medicaid Enrollment to 80 Million People, a ‘High-Water Mark’
A family of two has to pay for the health care of three.
So the bottom line is, the taxpayers aren’t just paying for the Medicaid patients to get treatment, they’re paying for all the WASTE that Medicaid patients are incurring along with paying for getting worse service. Of course Medicaid is administer by the State so this will vary from State to State but I suspect it’s pretty wide spread.
No Show rates are usually highest in poor (work commitments) and Pediatrics...
The reason is waiting... My wife works in Public Health in Ireland and because of No Shows there is usually over booking... This means if they all show then there is a long wait. This means sometimes people just need to go to work (they can't afford missing work)...
Technology has been introduced (message 24 hr confirm, reminders,...) and these wait times have been drastically reduced and last minute stand bys have been leveraged, also the service has been better at using there time for no shows... Generally she said in the last 7 years it is not an issue, but it took a bit of understanding their patient needs, investment and a bit of tech.
Actually in things like wound care, people with private insurance use the public system as it can be more convenient... (In Ireland even if you have insurance you get an option of using public services in number of cases (Hospital care, out-patient nursing care (wounds, check ups, eye test, diabetic care...).. Everyone pays taxes so within reason you can use public services... GP visits are private and poor have a "Medical Card"(this is Ireland version of full access free public care)