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Physician Access in California Obamacare Plans

July 28, 2016

Health plans in the health insurance marketplaces have been competing to keep prices low, while still offering all the services mandated under the Affordable Care Act. One way to do this is to restrict provider networks to lower cost providers. For patients, restricting provider networks may be a good deal if the quality of care in these restricted networks is good and they are able to readily access providers when they need them.

To answer the latter question, a paper by Haeder, Weimer, and Mukamel (2016) used a “secret shopper” survey to see how long it would take to make an appointment for primary care services.

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