Jerry Moran: “This Medicare provision is a typical Government one-size-fits-all solution to a problem that we do not have in rural…”

“This Medicare provision is a typical Government one-size-fits-all solution to a problem that we do not have in rural America. In Kansas, we have too few physicians, not too many. Rural communities have access to one-half the physicians of those who live in urban areas, and in fact, as our Nation as a whole has. Of the 66 counties in the First Congressional District of Kansas, two-thirds of those have been designated as medically underserved. I work hard almost every week to try to assist communities and hospitals in obtaining foreign-trained physicians in order to try to satisfy these needs. Thirty-five foreign-trained physicians have been admitted and are practicing in the First District in Kansas under this J-1 visa program. We have another dozen applicants pending to fill a very desperate need. What we should be doing instead of utilizing money not to train physicians, we should be paying hospitals and physicians to train physicians who will then fulfill these needs in rural and other underserved areas of the country. We should support physicians who are willing to serve in those communities, and we also should assist in keeping them there once they have been trained and are willing to serve the needs of rural and other underserved areas of the country. Mr. Chairman, in rural Kansas, this is not a quality-of-life issue, this is a survival issue.”