A policy brief by the RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis assesses U.S. primary care physician and general surgeon willingness to accept Medicare patients and the reasons for not accepting these patients. The study finds that overall rural physicians are more likely than urban physicians to accept all new Medicare patients.
Because it is critical that rural America’s elderly have physicians willing to accept new Medicare patients, how Congress addresses the temporarily-resolved Medicare physician payment issue will be of great concern to rural providers and communities. Read more about the President’s two year plan for the Medicare “doc fix” included in his recent budget proposal.
