Three-quarters of California’s Obamacare health plans offer narrow physician networks, according to a new nationwide survey.
That’s among the most restricted showings in the country, the University of Pennsylvania study showed.
Narrow networks are defined as those including fewer than a quarter of the physicians working in an area. Insurers often limit the number of health care providers in a network in order to save money.
“Narrow provider networks have emerged as one of the only remaining pieces in the
insurers’ cost-containment toolbox,” researchers at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics said.
Consumers often can’t tell how narrow networks are before buying their insurance via the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, researchers said, noting that provider directories are “notoriously out-of-date.”
The study grouped networks offered in 2014 into “T-shirt sizes” in order to simplify the concept. In California, 38 percent were rated X-small, 38 percent were rated small, 19 percent medium and 6 percent were large. In total, 75 percent were rated “narrow.”
Only three states — Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma — had a higher percentage of narrow networks. (Not all states have marketplaces.) Georgia had the most narrow insurance networks of the 2014 health exchanges.
“As the prevalence of narrow provider networks increases, the ability to measure their size, assess their adequacy, and transparently communicate this information to consumers and regulators becomes essential,” the researchers said in the study “State Variation in Narrow Networks on the ACA Marketplaces.”
A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found adults with Covered California insurance (or Medi-Cal) were more likely to report problems with providers not taking them as a patient than adults with other private coverage.
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