Can Medicaid Expansion Address the Doctor Shortage?

Teresa Gardner Tyson, executive director of Health Wagon. Photo credit: Virginia Business

With Virginia on the cusp of Medicaid expansion, it is heartening to see someone asking the obvious question: What good is Medicaid coverage if you can’t find a doctor? Bob Burke at Virginia Business states the obvious:

Getting a Medicaid card doesn’t necessarily mean you have a doctor at hand. Plenty of places in Virginia — especially rural areas — already are short of health-care providers. Oftentimes, people there depend on nonprofit community health centers or free clinics (both of which are chronically underfunded) scattered around the state, or they just go without. This is the true access challenge.

Virginia has a network of clinics, health wagons and other services that provides basic care to poor Virginians, but the system operates on a shoestring, and thousands of people fall between the cracks. An important question is what happens to the existing medical infrastructure for the poor, as inadequate as it is, when Medicaid comes along?

Teresa Gardner Tyson runs The Health Wagon, a mobile clinic that delivers care to people in Southwest Virginia. Medicaid expansion would be favorable to the people she treats, she says, but it’s not a panacea. Some of Health Wagon’s patients are already Medicaid patients — and they can’t find any other health provider.

About five years ago, Health Wagon hired a consultant to run the numbers on how best to take advantage of Medicaid dollars if they started flowing. “We’d have to go back and look at those numbers again” and see whether becoming a Medicaid provider makes sense, Tyson says. “We’re sustained by donations and grants, and at the end of the day, though, we do give free care, [but] the care that we give is not free.”

Here is my question: What happens to those donations and grants if Medicaid expansion is enacted? Will Health Wagon still have a purpose? Perhaps it will, if nothing is done to address the shortage of health care practitioners in Southwest Virginia and there’s nowhere else to go. But if that shortage isn’t addressed and patients still can’t find doctors, is anyone better off?

The Virginia Community Healthcare Association (VCHA), which has 29 member organizations at 147 sites, serves about 100,000 uninsured people every year. CEO Neal Graham estimates that of that number, about 70,000 would be eligible for Medicaid after expansion. He also estimates that expansion will bring an additional 100,000 patients into the clinics and community centers. But it’s not clear at all from Burke’s article that the clinics will have the resources to staff up to meet the extra demand.

There are two problems in rural Virginia: a lack of health coverage and a shortage of health care practitioners. Medicaid expansion fixes the first problem. But as long as the program pays less than Medicare and private insurance — typically forcing medical providers to operate at a loss — Medicaid expansion will do nothing to recruit new practitioners to under-served areas. If lawmakers want the expansion to work, they must address the shortage of doctors, nurses, and technicians. Otherwise, they’re just perpetrating a cruel hoax on Virginia’s poor.