How to Find Doctors Who Take Government Insurance

Millions of people are on either Medicare or Medicaid as part of their healthcare insurance. The difficult thing is to find doctors who are willing to take this insurance. Not that there are few of them around, but it can be a hassle to call around and make sure. There’s nothing worse than making an appointment or going straight to a walk in clinic and then being told they don’t take your insurance plan. If you want to find doctors who take government insurance without leaving the house, here are some tips to help you out.

The first thing you want to do is go to the Medicare official website. From there, you can filter through their provider search. They offer a number of selections from which you can choose and filter down your results. For instance, if you are looking for a particular specialist, a physician in a certain zip code, or what not, you can make the selections that will show only those results. From there, you can make your choice based on a limited number of physicians. It may be helpful to have any pertinent information at hand (such as your phone number or address) should it be needed at some point in the process.

If you’re having trouble using the official search, there are other places on the internet that can help you out. There are several review-based websites that list physicians and have them ranked according to customer review. These websites usually provide quite a bit of information about the listed physicians, and this may include whether or not they accept government insurance. Using this method, it still makes sense to call ahead just to make sure the information on the site hasn’t changed.

If you are unable to find doctors in your desired specialty who accept Medicaid, don’t give up hope. Because physicians are forced to accept less payment from these forms of insurance, they sometimes only open their practice up to new government patients at certain times during the year. You may have been unlucky enough to search during the off-times. Go back at another time and redo your search and you may find there are more options available. The same goes for when you make the call yourself. If the receptionist tells you they are not accepting new Medicaid patients, ask them if they anticipate doing so in the future. If so, you might consider seeing another physician in the meantime, while keeping open the option of returning later.