Call for more residency slots!

I need your IMMEDIATE help TODAY in contacting your U.S. Senators to let them know you support the addition of new Medicare supported residency (GME) positions as part of health care reform to ensure that we have enough physicians and that medical students continue to have adequate residency opportunities.

Specifically, Senate amendment SA 2909 would add up to 15,000 new training slots. It is sponsored by a group of Democratic Senators including the Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Vice Chair of the Democratic Caucus Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Since 1997, when Congress froze (“capped”) Medicare’s support for GME training, the nation’s medical schools and teaching hospitals have worked hard to ease those restrictions. This is the closest we have been in a dozen years to actually doing so.

We have been informed that the Senate intends to include some GME cap relief in their health care reform package. This effort is strongly supported by the American College of Physicians, the American College of Surgeons, the AMA, AOA, and several other national physician groups (see attached letter).

However, we are extremely concerned that the amendment is strongly opposed by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) and the Council of Academic Family Medicine (CAFM). While the Senate amendment does establish explicitly preferences for primary care and general surgery training programs (see summary below), the family medicine groups strongly oppose SA 2909 because it does not restrict residency support to primary care and it does not penalize institutions or physicians for subspecialization.

The AAMC has great respect for the key role played by each and every specialty, including family medicine, and our President, Dr. Darrell Kirch, has repeatedly highlighted the need to devote greater energy to all the dimensions of the primary care crisis. That being said, our community can ill afford having a single specialty view itself as exercising a veto card.

This fragmentation of physician voices has been a problem throughout the health care debate, and now appears to threaten something we need desperately to avert looming physician access problems.

We believe that the AAMC-supported GME language is a critical step toward increasing training positions as medical school enrollment grows and the nation faces a physician shortage. This is an historic opportunity—we are unlikely to see such strong Congressional support for expanding GME support in the future.

Please call your U.S. Senators IMMEDIATELY by contacting the Capitol Hill Switchboard at (202) 224-3121; they will forward you to the appropriate Senate offices. You will also find contact information on the Senate.Gov website at: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm?OrderBy=state&Sort=ASC ).

Please tell your Senators that "I am a medical student from (Your State) and I strongly support the inclusion of SA 2909 in health care reform legislation--without it, we will face greater physician shortages than already expected."

Thanks for your urgent attention to this matter and feel free to contact me or any of my colleagues with questions. I hope that you will urge other medical students and colleagues to act as well.