Medical Care in Rural Areas to Improve with Increased Government Spending

Healthcare leaders meeting with Senators recently state that it is difficult to attract quality healthcare professionals to rural areas due to poor physician reimbursement. At a recent forum, the group discussed a number of strategies to encourage more young doctors and other health professionals to rural areas, most notably being a plan to provide educational assistance to those who choose to practice in a rural environment.

Physician reimbursement was continually brought up. Readers may wish to visit New Jersey Healthcare Solutions for ways to improve physician reimbursement through enhanced coding and billing services. Physician reimbursement hits primary care physicians particularly hard and impacts the bottom line as well as physician salaries.

Congress would be necessary to make any other major changes in the way young doctors are recruited and retained in rural areas. Another tactic would be to act on the inequalities in the way the government distributes Medicare dollars. Some states have lower reimbursement rates than others and it is much worse for rural communities. Reimbursement rates have fallen about 20 percent below the government’s conservative measure of inflation for medical practice costs since 2001. The problem is made worse by a government formula that distributes Medicare dollars based on the historical pattern of individual counties’ health-care costs. This punishes those counties that have kept healthcare costs down by being efficient in the use of the healthcare dollar. Low reimbursement poses a threat to the healthcare of seniors and their access to care.