New government funding tackles primary care shortage

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced this week that it will put nearly $200 million toward community health center expansion funding and primary care physician training, as well as funding new health innovation projects that address primary care. But it is unlikely to make a sizeable dent in the primary care shortage, notes the grassroots advocacy group Primary Care Progress.

“At a time when primary care services in the United States are in increasingly short supply and the existing primary care workforce is under unrelenting pressure, the recent announcement by HHS of expanded funding for both community health centers and primary care residency training spots is welcome news,” said Andrew F. Morris-Singer, M.D., president and founder of Primary Care Progress. “But it's going to take a lot more money, over a much longer time period, to revitalize primary care in the United States. Despite 18 percent of American GDP being spent on healthcare, only a paltry 5 percent goes to primary care. That's less a case of primary care being underfunded and more of a case of primary care being disregarded. Fixing that is going to require significant changes in funding, considerably higher than what's currently on the table, over a much more sustained period of time to enable us to begin building the primary care infrastructure this country desperately needed decades ago. Until our government and society are willing to make that investment, I'm afraid our primary care system, and our healthcare system in tow, will continue to limp along, bankrupting families and companies, and delivering a relatively marginal overall quality of care to the population.”

In announcing the awards, HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell noted that the $100 million from the Affordable Care Act for health centers will create150 new sites across the country and the $83.4 million to support primary care residency programs will go toward helping train more than 550 residents at 60 Teaching Health Centers across the nation during the 2014-2015 academic year.

However, according to Primary Care Progress, more than 60 million Americans currently lack access to primary care. The HHS press release notes that currently the 9,200 existing health center sites provide care to more than 21 million patients, for an average of about 2,280 patients per site. The 550 new sites would might therefore only increase access to a little over one and a quarter million of the 60 million Primary Care Progress says need access.