Kevin Brady: “This amendment requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to award grants to hospitals, including critical…”

“This amendment requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to award grants to hospitals, including critical access hospitals, located in rural or medically underserved areas to establish and improve medical residency training programs. The goals in this amendment are laudable. But like so much around here, bipartisan work in this area has been stopped because of impeachment. The rush to impeachment has created a toxic atmosphere and prevented parties from working on the people's business, creating a constitutional crisis for purely political reasons. It is a nice change to hear this discussion because earlier this year, we offered in the Ways and Means Committee an amendment to reallocate these GME slots exactly to these rural and medically underserved areas. Unfortunately, those amendments were rejected on a largely partisan basis. I wish the gentleman from Arizona would have been with us that day because almost all Democrats voted no. That said, I do have real concerns. This amendment provides more Medicare-funded payments to hospitals for these GME slots but without making any immediate reforms that everyone knows need to happen. An Institute of Medicine report called for innovative approaches to finance these slots in order to improve the match between the physician workforce that we need and national healthcare needs.…”