Dive Brief:
- The majority of doctors in the US are still seeing Medicare patients even though reimbursement rates are lower than rates for those with private coverage.
- The controversy over new scorecards and Yelp ratings that are tied to Medicare data could cause some doctors to rethink their decisions to continue to accept Medicare patients.
- A SERMO survey of nearly 1,500 physicians asked if scorecards would negatively affect a physician's decision to accept Medicare patients. Fifty-nine percent of physicians who answered said they would.
Dive Insight:
SERMO is a social networking site that's exclusively for physicians. Since comments on SERMO are anonymous, the site allows physicians to freely express their opinions with no risk of recrimination.
According to Forbes, although the SERMO survey results were not made public, they were verified by SERMO sources.
Since physicians are not obligated to accept Medicare patients and reimbursement for Medicare patients is low, scorecards and other rating systems that use Medicare data to inform the public may be the final push many providers need to stop accepting Medicare patients at all.