The Effects of Population Disbursement, Percentage of Medicare Beneficiaries, and Per Capita Income on Medicare Fee Schedule Prices

Mercier, Ann Marie (2014) The Effects of Population Disbursement, Percentage of Medicare Beneficiaries, and Per Capita Income on Medicare Fee Schedule Prices. Undergraduate thesis, under the direction of William Rhodes from Accountancy, The University of Mississippi.

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Abstract

The thesis is an overview of the existing pay disparity in the fee-for-service billing amounts for professional medical services provided by physicians to Medicare patients in the United States. Will improvements in the per capita income, percentage of Medicare participants, or change in the population disbursement result in higher Medicare fee-for-service billing amounts for healthcare providers? Mississippi has one of the fewest primary care physicians per capita rates than any other state. One reason may be the Medicare fee-for-service prices paid to physicians. This paper will show Mississippi Medicare fee-for-service fee schedule prices for a sample of HCPCS codes compared to Medicare rates of several other states as a percentage of the Mississippi reimbursement rate. Similarly, the per capita income of these states is compared to the per capita income of Mississippi to determine a percentage of Mississippi per capita income to the comparison state. The percentage of Medicare participants, percentage of urban population, percentage of rural population, and percentage of very rural population is similarly scaled. Each factor was then compared to the percentage of Medicare fee-for-service reimbursement rates to determine what correlation exists between these factors. Per capita income and percentage of population benefitting from Medicare may be contributing factors for the Medicare physician fee-for-service rates, because they appeared to have a relationship with the Medicare physician fee-for-service billing rates studied.

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