When you’re trained in internal medicine, you’re not expecting your next “complex case” to be Medicaid policy. Yet here I am—staring down a 7% cut to New York’s Medicaid budget for 2025–2026 and wondering how we keep our clinic standing, let alone thriving.
But here’s the truth: You adapt. You restructure.
That means co-locating behavioral health into primary care visits. It means making our overworked care manager the MVP. It means telehealth check-ins for diabetes and depression—because you can’t afford no-shows or fragmented care.
You’re analyzing which services actually move the needle, and retraining our team to handle more in-house with e-consults as backup. You’re considering joining networks to share call centers, care coordinators, maybe even a Zoom therapist or two.
It’s not the medicine you trained for, but it’s the medicine your patients need now.
Have you had to rethink care delivery because of policy changes? What’s worked—or flopped—for your team?