U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Wednesday released a bipartisan draft policy document addressing the nation’s physician workforce shortages in primary care and psychiatry, particularly in America’s rural areas.
The document, which outlines a draft proposal and specific questions for consideration on policies under consideration related to the Medicare Graduate Medical Education (GME) program, describes improvements to both the Medicare GME program and the distribution of physicians to rural and underserved communities.
Sen. Tillis and six members of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee worked on the draft document as the Bipartisan Medicare GME Working Group.
“As a bipartisan group of members of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Medicare [GME] program, we are interested in advancing additional Medicare GME proposals to address healthcare workforce shortages and gaps,” Sen. Tillis and his colleagues wrote in the draft outline, entitled “Draft Proposal Outline and Questions for Consideration.”
The senators pointed out that due to a concern that there was an oversupply of physicians, Congress in 1996 capped the amount of Medicare GME funding a teaching hospital could receive based on the number of residents a hospital was training.
“Nearly 30 years later, it has become clear that there are not enough physicians to meet the healthcare needs of Americans,” wrote the senators.
Among several proposals, they suggest expanding and improving the distribution of Medicare-supported GME residency training positions to rural areas and specialties in shortage; helping rural hospitals with the infrastructure needed to support residency training programs; and bolstering federal data collection to ensure that federal GME dollars are being used to train in specialties and geographic areas facing a physician shortage, according to the document.
“As with other policy proposals considered by the Senate Finance Committee, we intend to separately identify appropriate offsets that will pay for the cost of new Medicare GME policies,” added the senators.