FP Report -- March 1999
Action alert
Ask Congress to make GME technical corrections
In 1997, Congress set caps on numbers of residents to slow the influx of physicians into the nation's workforce. Inadvertently, the legislation created problems for family practice residencies.
So last year, family medicine organizations wrote model legislation to fix the glitches, and members of Congress introduced the bills. They were not passed last year but were expected to be reintroduced late last month.
Ask your senators and representatives to cosponsor the bills titled Graduate Medical Education Technical Amend-ments Act.
The bills target technical problems created by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. For example, the bills would:
- expand caps on numbers of residents from those trained in hospitals in 1996 to include all of those trained in community settings, most of whom were family physicians;
- enable new residency programs that missed the approval deadline of August 1997 to be approved by Sept. 30, 1999; and
- allow urban residencies that sponsor rural training tracks to exempt the rural tracks from the BBA caps.
The bills made little progress last year partly because the Congressional Budget Office estimated unrealistically high costs for their implementation. The new bills would scale back one provision that deals with caps on residents in hospitals that have only one residency. Last year's bills called for single-residency hospitals to be completely exempt from caps; this year's revised bills would allow for growth of one position per year of residency, up to a total of three positions.
At press time, the GME Technical Amendments Act was expected to be reintroduced soon by Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Reps. John Baldacci, D-Maine, and Tom Allen, D-Maine.
FP Report is published by the AAFP News Department. Copyright © 1999 by American Academy of Family Physicians.
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