State Health Compare

In order to maintain State Health Compare (SHC) as a relevant and current resource for data users, SHADAC regularly evaluates SHC measures to ensure they inform current health care and health policy discussions. We also want to be able to update measures consistently with recent data. As a part of this process, SHADAC retires existing measures if they can no longer be updated, are no longer relevant, are little used by SHC users, or fall outside of SHADAC’s areas of focus. 

• Had a General Doctor or Provider Visit
• Medicaid Expenses as a Percent of State Budgets

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Medicaid is the largest single source of health insurance coverage in the United States, covering millions of individuals every year. Despite Medicaid’s key role in the American health care landscape, not all physicians are willing to accept new patients who are covered by the program. Researchers have identified a number of reasons why some physicians do not participate in Medicaid, such as administrative problems when submitting claims to Medicaid and lower Medicaid reimbursement rates compared to Medicare and private insurance plans. Tracking the rate of physicians who accept new Medicaid patients is therefore a key step in identifying the areas in which Medicaid beneficiaries are more or less likely to experience difficulty accessing health care due to their insurance status.    

 

State Health Compare provides state-level rates of physicians who reported accepting payments from Medicaid patients across different timeframes and breakdowns (e.g., type of clinical setting, share of Medicaid patients, ratio of mid-level providers).  Estimates for this measure are representative of non-federally employed office-based physicians who engage primarily in direct patient care and are based on findings from the National Electronic Health Records Survey (NEHRS) fielded by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).