Medicare and Graduate Medical Education

Abstract

After 30 years of supporting graduate medical education through open-ended payment policies that rewarded academic medical centers for producing more physicians, the federal government last year curtailed Medicare's generous commitment to subsidize the training of new doctors. At the same time, Congress reclaimed for teaching hospitals the educational funds that were embedded in Medicare's payments to managed-care organizations, most of which were not passed on to the institutions actually doing the training. These provisions and many more (some 300 in the case of Medicare alone) were contained in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, a measure signed into law last . . .