A doctor who won't take any insurance or Medicare? Yank their license, plus imprisonment.

[Ms. Toad]

186. I don't know all the details -

And it may well have been a situation where none of the specialists accepted Medicare.

But we are hearing a second hand report of the problem. All searches (and all abilities to search) are not equal. I know that there are many times someone will tell me a resource does not exist and that they have searched for it for months and I am able to locate it in a matter of minutes or hours. I'm not saying that this is the case here - but we don't know enough details to make a federal case out of it based on a second hand anecdotal report.

The report probably does mean, at a minimum, that we need to streamline the process of connecting Medicare patients to doctors. My insurance company offers a "find a provider" search that identifies providers which accept my insurance and indicates whether they are accepting new patients. Something like that is probably needed for everyone - and if the problem reported was merely an inability to search efficiently that should address it.