Giving Compass' Take:

• Surveys indicate that low- and moderate-income adults, adults with chronic health conditions, and adults with Medicaid or other public coverage face various barriers to finding a new health care provider. 

• How can providers help remove these barriers? Where can donors step in and help make this process easier?

• Read why mental health providers need to adapt during COVID-19. 

Policymakers and advocates have called for policies and programs to expand access to health insurance, but for many Americans, being insured doesn’t automatically guarantee finding a provider who will see them.

In 2019, more than one in seven (15.5 percent) adults with health insurance coverage all year reported difficulty finding a health care provider who would see them in the previous 12 months according to the Health Reform Monitoring Survey, a nationally representative survey of adults 18 to 64 years old.

Among adults who had problems finding a new provider, half reported being told by one or more providers that they weren’t taking new patients, and almost two-thirds were told by one or more providers that they didn’t take the consumer’s health insurance.

Low- and moderate-income adults, adults with chronic health conditions, and adults with Medicaid or other public coverage were more likely to report problems finding a new provider. More than one in five full-year-insured low-income adults, adults with a chronic condition, and adults with public coverage reported difficulty finding a provider during the previous year.

What problems did consumers encounter when searching for a new provider? In follow-up interviews with 30 respondents, many reported that their health plan’s information on participating providers was outdated. Similarly, provider websites often offered limited information on what health insurance they accepted and whether they were accepting new patients, limiting a consumer’s ability to quickly screen potential providers.

Consumers reported making as many as 20 calls to different providers to find care and often faced long waits—from multiple months to more than a year—to see the new provider.

Read the full article about the difficulties of finding new health care providers by Teresa A. Coughlin, Haley Samuel-Jakubos, Graeme Peterson, Sharon K. Long at Urban Institute.