New Health Policy Brief: Medicaid Primary Care Parity

A new policy brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) examines how states have dealt with the expiration of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Medicaid primary care fee bump.

This provision required states to raise Medicaid primary care payments to make them comparable with those of Medicare; the federal government, not the states, subsidized the increase for 2013 and 2014. Federal lawmakers failed to renew the program at the end of last Congress. So in 2015 only sixteen states and the District of Columbia took on the additional costs of continuing to pay Medicaid providers at the enhanced rate. This policy brief describes the program and its impact.