Healthcare Workforce Bills Moving Along in Congress

WASHINGTON — As Congress continues to struggle with debt ceiling and infrastructure issues, lawmakers continue to work on other bills, including those related to the health workforce.

On Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) announced his co-sponsorship of a bill to increase the number of Medicare-funded graduate medical education (GME) slots by 14,000 over the next 7 years. “The pandemic has underscored the dire lack of physicians to care for patients in urgent need,” said Kaine in a statement about the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act of 2021. “I’m proud to support this legislation, which takes important steps to get more doctors to the communities that need it most.”

In addition to increasing the number of GME slots funded by Medicare, the measure, introduced in March by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), would also lift the cap on the number of GME positions at qualifying hospitals. Of the Medicare-funded slots that would be added under the bill, half would be for specialists and half for primary care physicians. The measure would prioritize the increases for hospitals in rural areas, hospitals in states with new medical schools, hospitals already training physicians in excess of their cap, and hospitals in a health professional shortage area.

The bill — which now has 16 Senate co-sponsors, including two Republicans — also requires the Comptroller General to complete a study within 2 years of the bill’s enactment on strategies for increasing the diversity of the health professional workforce.

“Rural communities, communities that are low-income, underserved communities — those communities all struggle to get trained healthcare workers,” said a member of Kaine’s staff. “This type of report looks at those factors and doesn’t just look at simply the number of training slots, but also looks at other ways that we can work to support rural communities and underserved communities, and have the whole span of trained professionals.”

The bill also has a companion measure in the House, which has 138 co-sponsors, including 25 Republicans; it was introduced by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.).

Sen. Kaine is also pushing for passage of another bill related to the health workforce, the Supporting Our Direct Care Workforce and Family Caregivers Act, which he introduced in July. This bill, which has seven Democratic co-sponsors, would provide federal funding to states and other entities “for initiatives to build, retain, train, and otherwise promote the direct care workforce … and provide grants for states or other eligible entities for educational and training support for both paid and unpaid family caregivers.”

Direct caregivers are defined as those who provide services to older or disabled people to help promote their independence, such as assistance with activities of daily living. The bill would also establish a technical assistance center to help build up a direct care workforce.

The direct care workforce of 4.5 million workers, which includes nearly 2.3 million home care providers — is expected to grow by more than a million by 2028, and that doesn’t include replacing those who will leave the field, the senator’s office noted in a press release. In addition, “the shortage of direct care workers often puts pressure on family caregivers. The number of American caregivers providing unpaid caregiving has increased over the past 5 years, and 23% of caregivers say that caregiving has made their health worse.”