Physician Views on which Insurance Performs Better: Private Insurance or Traditional Medicare*

This slide shows that despite support for Medicare expansions and for a public option similar in design to Medicare, physicians preferred private plans to the traditional Medicare program in three areas.

The majority of physicians (62%) prefer private plans to Medicare in terms of adequacy of payments while only 9.2% preferred Medicare. Thirty-three percent of respondents believed that private insurance was better in terms of paperwork and administrative hassles compared to 28.8% of respondents who believed Medicare was superior. Physicians also believed private insurance is superior to Medicare in terms of timeliness of reimbursements (31.9% vs. 23.6%). Yet in two clinically important areas there was no difference between Medicare and private insurance or Medicare was slightly better: ease of obtaining needed services for their patients (33.5% vs. 36.1%) and autonomy in decision making (30.0% vs. 33.8%).