Should Medicaid pay for Direct Primary Care memberships? A discussion with Lawson Mansell, Health Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center

​There is perhaps no better example in the American healthcare system of the challenges associated with financing preventative and primary care than Medicaid. With lower reimbursement rates than Medicare and commercial insurance and increasingly fragile state budgets, it’s hard for state Medicaid agencies and Medicaid Managed Care Organizations to build adequate primary and preventative networks.

​In no small part because of these inadequate networks, Medicaid beneficiaries are high utilizers of emergency departments which drives increased costs to the system and stretches precious state and federal dollars further.

​Direct Primary Care, or DPC, is a promising solution to this problem despite its usual usually association with up-market, concierge medicine practices with states like Michigan and Montana experimenting with the concept. There’s also a bipartisan bill called the Medicaid Primary Care Improvement Act working its way through congress. We’ll be discussing the specifics of this bill and the practicalities of expanding the DPC model to government programs with Health Policy Analyst Lawson Mansell from the Niskanen Center.