During Virginia’s long debate on expanding Medicaid, the siren song for supporters has been “access to health care.” Pass the bill, they said, and thousands of uninsured finally will get to see doctors and nurses.
If only it was that easy. Getting a Medicaid card doesn’t necessarily mean you have a doctor at hand. Plenty of places in Virginia — especially rural areas — already are short of health-care providers. Oftentimes, people there depend on nonprofit community health centers or free clinics (both of which are chronically underfunded) scattered around the state, or they just go without. This is the true access challenge.
And, even with new money to help recruit providers, the whole health-care network, public and private, has to figure out how many new enrollees they’ll need to care for. So, it would take some time to see the full effect.
Deborah Oswalt, executive director of the Virginia Health Care Foundation, says the health-care sector will rise to the challenge of treating the newly insured. “I’ll tell you why. Because every one of [the new Medicaid enrollees] will go into managed care.
