You find yourself unable to receive health care coverage through your parents, your job, or your school. Then, you feel a sudden relief as you read “Keeping America Healthy” on Medicaid.gov. I have Medicaid, and I can say that my relief was brief.

For starters, anyone who needs health insurance should apply for Medicaid–it is crucial to have health care coverage. However, people should be educated on navigating health coverage that doesn’t cover as well as they hope. Due to the system we have today, Medicaid discrimination is real, and those who don’t have it, don’t know it. Certain medical providers do not accept Medicaid because of the poor reimbursement rates. This means when comparing a patient with Medicaid and a patient with a private health care provider, the doctor will accept the private coverage instead of Medicaid because the private insurance provider will pay the doctor more money than Medicaid will.

Medicaid is an entitlement program and therefore, Congress will continue to fund it. However, entitlement programs make up two-thirds of the federal budget, so increasing doctor reimbursement rates seems unlikely. Research done by Tulane University examined patients across all fifty states between 2013 and 2016. The study found that Medicaid patients received 27.6% fewer appointments than privately insured patients.

The gap between reimbursement rates needs to be closed so that providers do not turn away Medicaid patients. The federal government needs to ensure that providers are getting reimbursed efficiently. If this is not addressed, Medicaid patients will continue to face difficulty in accessing quality health care.