Barriers to Access In an ideal world, after the enactment of the ACA, millions of Americans would gain coverage under the Medicaid expansion or young adults expansion, and all of these newly covered people would then have the opportunity to set up a primary care provider and receive care and treatment through their own primary care physician. Unfortunately, that is not the case and millions of Americans are left with coverage, but no access to primary care. Thus resulting in higher numbers of ED visits by newly insured individuals due to lack of access to primary care. Identifying the barriers to accessing primary care will help to formulate solutions for this health care crisis. One of the most popular barriers to access to primary care is an inadequate supply and availability of primary care options (Cheung et al., 2012). Most primary care offices run a normal 8am to 5pm Monday through Friday schedule, which proves to be difficult for many Americans who are working. Specifically looking at Medicaid versus private insurance, there is a large gap between access to primary care, 16.3% of Medicaid beneficiaries had greater than or equal to one barrier to timely primary care compared to the 8.9% of private insurance beneficiaries (Cheung et al., 2012).
In a recent survey, researchers took five common …show more content…
Some will argue “no” due to the fact that Massachusetts had the highest number of primary care physicians per capita in the U.S. at the time of the Massachusetts Experiment, yet still had an increase in overall ED visits (Smulowitz et al., 2011). Thus proving that despite having an adequate number of primary care physicians, this did not serve as an acceptable substitute for the ED and patients still sought care from the ED. One reason for this increase in overall ED visit rates could be that primary care has limited resources and operating hours compared to the