The Obama administration on Monday announced a $1 billion federal fund allocation for last year's health reform law to be channeled toward innovation programs designed to boost jobs and improve patient care.
The administration promised that it will also award grants in March to people who come up with the best ideas to lift care and save money for those enrolled in the federal healthcare programs Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Don Berwick, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said a good example includes the Baylor Heart Hospital in Dallas which has worked to lower readmission rates for congestive heart failure. “With the healthcare innovation challenge, we're going straight to the source,” Berwick said during a news conference for the announcement report Reuters. “We want to find them, we want to help them, we want to spread what they know and what they've learned.”
This $1 billion of awards will cut into the $10 billion that Congress set aside in the Affordable Care Act to fund a new CMS Innovation Center. The center is meant to promote better care and health at reduced costs by identifying, testing and spreading new models of care and payment. The rules are that to get a grant, projects must start within six months and the program will concentrate on those ideas that spur the most hiring and workforce training, the Department of Health and Human Services said. Awards will range from around $1 million to up to $30 million and be spread over three years. Applications are open to providers, payers, local government, community organizations and public-private partnerships.
At the same time, the country faces a doctor shortage. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects that the United States will have 63,000 fewer doctors than it needs by 2015. That shortage will grow to 130,600 doctors by 2025. The need for a larger health-care workforce will probably become particularly acute in 2014, when the health-care overhaul is expected to expand health insurance coverage to millions of Americans. By 2019, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects, 32 million more Americans will have gained health insurance coverage.
President Barack Obama has been aggressively promoting programs that hold potential to boost hiring, amid 9 percent U.S. unemployment. Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have meanwhile passed a number of measures to boost jobs, but these have yet to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Asked how many jobs the grants would create, Dr. Rick Gilfillan, acting director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, said, “This is not about a specific number. This is about recognizing that there are going to be more people involved in healthcare” as the population ages. “The question is what are they going to be doing,” he said, adding that the program would help identify high-value jobs in healthcare and help train people for them.
Some Republicans have questioned the innovation center's approach. “We are concerned that at a time of significant uncertainty for the fiscal health of the U.S. government, funds are being expended by the Innovation Center with little to no actual value provided,” three Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee wrote to Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last week.
“We have a wealth of good ideas in health care, but the big challenge is spread,” Berwick said. “This will be seed money to get innovation to go further. This is venture capital to grow good ideas to scale.”
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