Pennsylvania doctors are worried that patients with coverage from the Health Insurance Marketplace will seek treatment, then won’t be able to pay their out-of-pocket expenses.
Some of the plans available through the Affordable Care Act only cover 60 percent of medical costs until an annual deductible of $6,350 is met. The rest of the fees must come from the patient, said Michael Fraser, executive vice president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society.
“Physicians are worried about accumulating a lot of bad debt from these patients,” Fraser said during a Nov. 26 visit to Erie. “If the patient comes in with bad insurance, like the bronze plans (through the exchange) that cover only 60 percent of the costs, the physicians are the ones who will have to collect the rest.”
Though physicians are concerned about uncompensated care, the Pennsylvania Medical Society — which represents about 20,000 physicians and medical students — is not opposed to the Affordable Care Act itself, Fraser said.
It will provide affordable health coverage to many Pennsylvanians who are currently uninsured or have expensive individual policies, he said, and many of the state’s doctors wholeheartedly support what is also known as Obamacare.
“We want people to be covered and have access to medical care,” Fraser said. “The devil is in the details.”
Requiring physician offices to begin using electronic medical records was one of the first elements of the Affordable Care Act that made an impact on Pennsylvania physicians, Fraser said.
Purchasing electronic medical records systems and having to use them spurred many physicians, including some in Erie, to sell their practices to local and regional health systms.
“It was one of the reasons we joined with UPMC,” said Craig Johnston, D.O., a family physician with Erie Physicians Network, which joined UPMC in 2011. “The requirements on physicians are onerous. I don’t know if independent physicians will be able to continue for very long.”
Physicians, especially those in primary-care practices such as internal medicine, pediatrics and family medicine, are also concerned that they will be spread too thin to provide proper care for their patients.
The demands of the Affordable Care Act, coupled with the growing number of practices that are hospital-owned, require doctors to see more patients each hour than they previously did, Fraser said.
“Physicians, especially employed physicians, are being told to see more patients,” Fraser said. “They feel it’s eroding their ability to spend time with each patient and provide the medical care these patients need.”
But Johnston said he has felt no pressure from UPMC to see more patients each day since the health system purchased EPN, and hopes the Affordable Care Act doesn’t increase that pressure, either.
“We haven’t seen our workload increase,” said Johnston, who sees patients at Pinecrest Family Practice, 3535 Pine Ave. “We actually have a new physician in our practice who has slots available, so we can add some patients.”
