Auditor Alert
Here is some more good news. With more and more people going onto Medicaid as inspired by the ACA, there will be more and more auditors and more and more audits:
Medicaid’s operation as a federal-state program means that health care professionals face the prospect of being audited at both of those levels. State programs have their own auditing operations, and several nationwide initiatives exist to identify improper payments. The latter include Medicaid integrity contractors, or MICs, and Medicaid recovery audit contractors, or RACs. A third program, the Payment Error Rate Measurement Program, measures and reports a national improper payment rate annually for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Now, doesn’t seeing Medicaid patients sound more and tempting? Trust me, they are going to have to make a law or license requirements to see these patients. Why? Because no one wants to get paid next to nothing for so much trouble.
Get paid less.
More than even the usual amount of paper work to have operations approved.
More likely to get audited.
Payments can be lowered at a whim.
Gee, sounds like a great deal to me! Where can I sign up?
(Okay, turning sarcastic font off now)
This is great! “MIC”‘s??? Those are perfectly named! The Minimum Inhibitory Concentration is the amount of antibiotic it takes to halt the growth of a bacteria. The new Medicaid inspectors are the antibiotic – doctors are the bacteria.
Physicians have been swabbed in the culture dish, while those that support the good intentions of government care are watching to see just how much harassment, low pay, abuse from patients, and general BS will be required to retard our growth.
The best laugh is on all of our colleagues who think that single-payer will improve all of this. Bring it on! Your government is explicitly saying that YOU are the problem, the bacteria that is harming health care.