Convert Medicare to a Premium Support Program

Emergency Departments today suffer a great loss of revenue due to several factors. One of those being slow and or low reimbursement rates from Medicare. If we were to cut Medicare completely then the emergency departments would most likely experience even more overcrowding than it normally does. People who do not have insurance rely on emergency departments for primary care. Today some physicians are choosing not to accept Medicare patients. This may be somewhat alleviated by implementing the health option that will be discussed in this paper.

Health Option

The most effective health option to solve some of the emergency department’s problems would be to “Convert Medicare to a premium support program (Options for Reducing the Deficit, 2016).” The way that is would be most effective is if the policy holders would be able to choose an insurance plan from a commercial provider and the government would pay for part of the cost of the coverage. By implementing this plan, then it would ensure that patients would receive better care and providers would be paid more efficiently (Cunningham, 2006).

Evaluation

To begin the evaluation to implement this plan, I would send out a survey that would cover the cost of insurance to the patients, the revenue that the emergency department receives through Medicaid vs private insurance, the quality of care vs services being offered, and the average amount of wait time to be seen in the emergency department. Once I have collected all of this data, it will be clear to see that implementing the premium support program will help improve all of these areas of concern.


Proposed Changes

There are several aspects of the emergency department that can be changed that would help benefit the patient. Starting with changing the way services are paid for. If we allow people to purchase a commercial plan, with the help of the government paying for part of the cost of coverage, there would be a domino effect. The emergency department would then be able to provide a higher level of care to patients. They would be able to provide more options to patients due to the expanded coverage that the patients now have. There would be more people taking advantage of their primary care providers, rather than using the emergency department for this purpose. In turn, that would reduce the overcrowding in the emergency department, causing less wait time to be seen. All of this untimely will create a high morale with in the department, which always reflects in the quality of services being rendered (Van De Water, 2011).

Conclusion

In conclusion, emergency departments suffer because of low insurance pay outs and because of patients not having proper insurance. The option to convert Medicaid into a premium support system would alleviate some of the problems facing the emergency department. The department wins in the way of being able to provide a higher quality of care and receive payment more efficiently and the patient wins by being able to receive the kind of care that was previously unattainable due to no insurance or low insurance coverage.