Typically what happens is that soon after you graduate you're feeling very altruistic and will see many medicaid payients as either your practice is building or because you're an associate and your senior dentist sends them your way
What you'll often find, is an assortment of the following:
1) The medicaid patient typically needs way more serious care (i.e. endo's, exo's pulpotomies, stainless steel crowns, dentures, etc) and inspite ofd your best diet/hygiene education efforts, will continue to have these poor habits that got them in "dental trouble" in the first place
2) The medicaid patient typically has a higher failure rate than the "regular: patient
3) Medicaid billing typically requires way more time and effort than "standard" insurance billing for what often amounts to 1/2 to 1/3 of the fees that "regular" insurance pays. Plus, medicaid may not even reimburse you for all the procedures that you do/would like to do to restore that patients mouth
Many Docs will after a couple of years stop seeing essentially all their medicaid patients because their schedules are full of full fee, less hassle patients. Then what often happens is that you'll end up treating a select few medicaid patients for free, so that you don't have to deal with the hassles of medicaid, and more importantly, you can treat them properly, the way you want too.
As pessimistic as this sounds, the medicaid system as a whole is so broken right now is that what it really needs is for it to self implode and then be rebuilt from the ground up. If you had medicaid either reimbursing consistantly on atleast a 66% level, or had partial student loan forgiveness based on amount of medicaid treatment you delivered in the previous year, or had free state licensure based on medicaid treatment delivered the previous year, you'd accomplish a heck of alot more treatment of the medicaid population than alot of the "garbage ideas" that many legislators currently have
(Rant is done noe!)
