Senate Sets Up Fight on Title VII Funds

Family medicine education programs have suffered from federal cuts in funding during the past couple of years, but there still is hope that work in Congress can raise federal funding levels for 2007.

As passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Labor-HHS budget package currently includes $50 million in funding for primary care training. That represents a 22.4 percent increase from the 2006 level of funding, but it still falls short of 2005 funding levels, which were $89 million.

“While the increase for (primary care training) is on top of a substantial cut in funding last year, the fact that we received an increase at all is a testament to the numerous calls made by our key contacts to their senators,” said Susan Hildebrandt, assistant director of AAFP’s Government Relations Division.

Section 747 of Title VII provides the only federal grants for training family physicians. Those funds help ensure there are enough family physicians working in underserved areas.

Community health centers, many of them in those underserved areas, would receive a boost of $145 million more than in 2006, to $1.9 billion in 2007.

The Senate budget includes $304 million for health professions programs, compared with $295 million in 2006. All of the increase went to boost funding for Title VII. Nursing education funding, appropriated as part of Title VIII, is set at the same level as in 2006.

“While we understand there are many competing priorities in the fiscal year 2007 bill, we fear that the enacted and proposed cuts to the health professions programs will exacerbate current and future health care challenges and will impact our nation’s most vulnerable communities,” says a July 10 letter (PDF file: 3 Pages/248 KB. More about PDFs.) to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., from the Health Professions and Nursing Education Coalition, of which the Academy is a member. Specter chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Labor, HHS, Education and Related Agencies.

Overall, the Senate’s budget includes $142.8 billion in spending, a figure that exceeds President Bush’s budget request and the package passed by the House of Representatives by more than $5 billion. Some members of the Senate would like to see that number rise by another $2 billion before the bill is sent to conference, where it will have to be consolidated with the House measure. Those meetings with the House are not expected to happen until after the November elections.

Some of that new money also could be used to increase Title VII funding and help primary care education.

According to media reports, Specter told the appropriations committee that the remaining cuts in the bill represent “the disintegration of the appropriate federal role in health, education and worker protections.”