Primary care physicians serving Medicaid patients will receive a raise in their fees for the next two years.

The raises, a temporary measure mandated by the Affordable Care Act, will be in effect for calendar years 2013 and 2014 and will raise Medicaid’s primary care physician fees to the same level paid by Medicare for comparable services.

The $11 billion needed to pay for this raise will come from the federal government.  States will not be required to provide matching funds.

Read a news release from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) about the new Medicaid primary care fee here, a CMS fact sheet here, and the newly proposed regulation here.

Health care reform will require non-profit hospitals to do more with less in the coming years, according to Moody’s Investors Services.

Moody’s, which rates hospitals’ financial condition when they go to the bond market, notes that Medicare will soon be implementing new, more demanding payment policies, many states are reducing Medicaid payments, and private insurers can be expected to follow the lead of their public counterparts.

As a result, Moody’s expects to downgrade the bond ratings of more hospitals in the coming year than it did in the past year.

Read more about why Moody’s sees an unhappy immediate future for non-profit hospitals in this Reuters report.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded $728 million in grants to help expand and improve community health centers that primarily serve low-income Americans.

The funding came through the Affordable Care Act.

Many of these community health centers expect a significant new influx of patients when Medicaid rolls expand and health insurance becomes more affordable to low-income families in 2014.

Read more about the new federal funding, where it will go, and how it will be used in this Kaiser Health News report.

Medicaid will increase its matching rate for states that offer qualified services in the home or community for dual eligible recipients who might otherwise require nursing home or other institutional care.

The Community First Choice program, created under the Affordable Care Act, will increase the federal Medicaid matching rate by six percentage points for home- and community-based services that meet specific federal criteria.

Find a Department of Health and Human Services news release and fact sheet with further information about the new program here.

Will free clinics have a role in a post-Affordable Care Act world?  Will they even continue to exist?

Assuming the individual insurance mandate survives legal challenges, millions of currently uninsured Americans will start joining the ranks of the insured beginning in 2014 thanks to a major expansion of Medicaid eligibility and subsidies for those who cannot afford private insurance.  Under such circumstances, it’s not entirely clear who might need those clinics in the future and how – and whether – those clinics might need to adjust to the changing times.

This Kaiser Health News report examines how the Affordable Care Act might affect free health clinics and how those clinics might look in the future.