Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. Mr. President, I am pleased to be joined by Senator Blunt in the reintroduction of the Building a Health Care Workforce for the Future Act.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, by 2025, there will be a shortage of up to 90,000 physicians. Approximately 1/3 of the shortage, up to 31,100 will be in primary care. Individuals and families living in underserved areas, urban and rural, will continue to be those most disadvantaged by this shortage.

Last year, we expanded our health care system to provide health insurance to millions more Americans. In fact, recent studies have shown that the uninsured rate has decreased to the lowest level since 1997 over the last 2 years. In Rhode Island, the uninsured rate decreased by half, down to 5 percent. As a result, millions of Americans are going to the doctor for preventive health care for the first time. In order for these efforts to be successful, we must expand our health care workforce to ensure that we have enough health care professionals to treat the newly insured.

The Building a Health Care Workforce for the Future Act would authorize programs that would grow the overall number of health care providers, as well as encourage providers to pursue careers in geographic and practice areas of highest need.

Building on the success of the National Health Service Corp, NHSC, Scholarship and Loan Repayment Programs, and the State Loan Repayment Program, this legislation would establish a state scholarship program. Like the NHSC State Loan Repayment Program, States would be able to receive a dollar-for-dollar match to support individuals that commit to practicing in the State in which the scholarship was issued after completing their education and training. At least 50 percent of the funding would be required to support individuals committed to pursuing careers in primary care. The States would have the flexibility to use the remaining 50 percent to support scholarships to educate students in other documented health care professional shortages in the state that are approved by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The Building a Health Care Workforce for the Future Act would also authorize grants to medical schools to develop primary care mentors on faculty and in the community. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, graduating medical students consistently state that role models are one of the most important factors affecting the career path they choose. Building a network of primary care mentors in the classroom and in a variety of practice settings will help guide more medical students into careers in primary care.

The legislation would couple these mentorship grants with an initiative to improve the education and training offered by medical schools in competencies most critical to primary care, including patient-centered medical homes, primary and behavioral health integration, and team-based care.

It would also direct the Institute of Medicine, IOM, to study and make recommendations about ways to limit the administrative burden on providers in documenting cognitive services delivered to patients. Primary care providers treat patients in need of these services almost exclusively, and as such, spend a significant percentage of their day documenting care. That is not the case for providers who perform procedures, like surgeries. This IOM study would help uncover ways to simplify documentation requirements, particularly for delivering cognitive services, in order to eliminate one of the potential factors that may discourage medical students from pursuing careers in primary care.

Providers across the spectrum of care recognize that this bipartisan legislation is part of the solution to addressing the looming health care workforce shortage and have lent their support, including: the Alliance for Specialty Medicine, the American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, the Association of Academic Health Centers, and the Association of American Medical Colleges.

I look forward to working with these and other stakeholders as well as Senator Blunt and our colleagues to pass the Building a Health Care Workforce for the Future Act in order to help ensure patients have access to the health care they need.

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