Teaching hospitals make residency funding pitch on Capitol Hill

Congress has capped federal funding for the training of new doctors, and hospital officials are hoping to get that limit lifted.

CQ Healthbeat: Teaching Hospitals Highlight Need to Expand Funding For Residencies
Officials from teaching hospitals highlighted at a briefing Tuesday for congressional staff the need for more federal money to train the nation's doctors. "We do need more federal money to help us," said James Keeton, dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, at the packed forum, which was sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Hospital Association. Medicare and Medicaid provide funding for graduate medical education, which pay for many of the positions for physicians in training. The 1997 Balanced Budget Act capped federal funding by limiting the number of positions the programs will support. Ideally, teaching hospital representatives would like to raise caps on federally-supported residency slots by 4,000 positions per year. That would cost about $10 billion over a decade -- a high price tag in the current fiscal environment (Adams, 10/7).

In other news about hospitals --

Kaiser Health News: Many Medicare Outpatients Pay More At Rural Hospitals, Federal Report Says
Many Medicare beneficiaries treated at primarily rural "critical access" hospitals end up paying between two and six times more for outpatient services than do patients at other hospitals, according to a report released Wednesday by the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services (Rau, 10/8).