Congress Dedicates $285 Million to Train Pediatricians

Congress has passed a bill providing $285 million for independent children’s teaching hospitals, such as Texas Children’s Hospital, to train pediatricians.

"Congress clearly has demonstrated its bipartisan support for children’s hospitals and for the future of children’s health care," said Mark A. Wallace, president and CEO of Texas Children’s. "Texas Children’s is extremely grateful to Congress, including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Rep. Ken Bentsen, for remaining steadfast in their commitment to ensure first-rate medical care for all children throughout Texas. This federal support is critical to our mission of providing the highest quality training to the next generation of pediatricians."

The fiscal year 2002 Labor/Health and Human Services Appropriations Bill is $50 million more than fiscal year 2001 and achieves the program’s original, 1999-authorized funding amount of $285 million.

Renewed federal support for graduate medical education, or GME, comes at a critical time as the industry strives to sustain high-quality clinical care, education and research missions while facing significant financial challenges due to cuts in state Medicaid programs, said Dr. Ralph Feigin, physician in chief at Texas Children’s and president and CEO of Baylor College of Medicine.

"Independent teaching hospitals like Texas Children’s now will receive a level of federal support for physician training that is much more comparable to what adult teaching hospitals receive under Medicare," said Dr. Feigin.

An inequitable gap in the way the federal government invests in GME programs at adult hospitals versus children’s hospitals long has been a cause for serious concern among child advocates. Nearly 30 percent of the nation’s pediatricians and 50 percent of all pediatric specialists are trained at independent children’s teaching hospitals. Furthermore, children’s hospitals often are the only source of care in a regional area for many critical pediatric services.

As managed care moved into the health care marketplace, traditional sources of GME support for all teaching hospitals began to dry up, leaving Medicare the one remaining, significant source of federal funding. Left largely outside of this funding stream because they treat children and not the elderly, many children’s teaching hospitals began facing difficult choices, such as continuing their GME programs at the expense of closing other important community service programs such as child abuse prevention or other specialty services.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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