Studies show the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has reduced the rate of uninsured patients, but what does this mean for practices' payer mix?
Here are seven statistics on how the PPACA impacts physician practices, broken down by Medicaid-expansion states and non-expansion states, according to data from ACAView, an initiative by athenahealth and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Medicaid-expansion states
- Primary care visits from Medicaid patients in expansion states increased from 15.6 percent in 2013 to 21.5 percent in 2015.
- Medicaid patients who were new in 2014, the first year of the PPACA expansion, returned to the same practice at a higher rate than those who were new to Medicaid in 2013.
- Uninsured adult visits dropped 2.2 percentage points, from 4.6 percent in 2013 to 2.4 percent in 2015.
- Commercial visits decreased from 65.2 percent in 2013 to 62.8 percent in 2015 in expansion states.
Non-expansion states
- The proportion of visits from Medicaid patients to primary care providers in non-expansion states dropped from 9.4 percent in 2013 to 8.9 percent in 2015.
- Uninsured adult visits dropped 1.5 percentage points between 2013 and 2015, from 7.2 percent to 5.7 percent.
- Visits from commercially-insured patients increased from 66.1 percent in 2013 to 68.1 percent in 2015.
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