

Bump Up the Volume on Medicaid Pay
In a New England Journal of Medicine article, LDI Executive Director Dan Polsky and co-authors at Penn and the Urban Institute evaluated a two-year pay bump for Medicaid primary care providers. The goal of the policy was to improve primary care availability for growing numbers of Medicaid patients. As the policy expired, Polsky and colleagues published the first evidence that the fee bump had its intended effect—if you pay Medicaid providers more (at least to Medicare levels), they see more Medicaid patients. He went to Capitol Hill to brief policymakers, and DHHS Secretary Burwell cited the paper in Congressional testimony. More coverage of this important paper is here.