According to some state officials and sources in the American Medical Association, the states who agreed to accommodate for the pay raise in year 2015 include Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Mississippi, Maryland, and New Mexico. Out of these, Alabama and Mississippi had not expanded the Medicaid scheme as required by the federal law.
On the contrary, there are states like Alaska and North Dakota, who have been paying higher salaries to primary care doctors even before the health regulation took effect in year 2013. Noteworthy, all other 42 states remain unmoved and they are likely to stick back to 2012 Medicaid pay rates.
The Medicaid scheme saw an increase in primary care pay rates through 2013 and 2014. The increase in pay rates has been brought under the observation that not too many doctors are inclined to serve Medicaid patients. One reason was thought to be abysmally low pay rates that were discouraging for the doctors to treat Medicaid patients.
Data from a survey conducted by the doctors at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that there has been a lot of variation in degree of receptiveness among the doctors towards the Medicaid patients with New Jersey having lowest rate at 40 percent of doctors taking the Medicaid patients while Wyoming giving the best results at 99 percent of doctors being open to Medicaid patients.
According to another 2012 study published in the journal Health Affairs, an average 69 percent of doctors in the US accept new Medicaid patients.
Some healthcare experts such as James Perrin, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, believe that increased pay rates will boost the morale and encourage more doctors to take Medicaid patients while some other physicians say that this would be just a short-term positive impact due to the two-year cap for pay raise. A temporary pay-raise for a two-year period may not be enough to attract most physicians.
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