Brown announces more than $295 million in funding for Children's Hospitals education program
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has announced that the year-end appropriations bill includes $295 million for the Children’s Hospitals Graduate Medical Education (CHGME) program, which supports children’s health care by providing freestanding children’s hospitals with federal funding to train pediatricians and pediatric specialists.
This marks a $30 million dollar increase from fiscal year 2015.
“Caring for our nation’s children demands specialized pediatric training,” Brown said. “Since its enactment in 1999, the Children’s Hospitals Graduate Medical Education program has helped train pediatricians and other professionals to treat our children. This funding boost will help Ohio’s children’s hospitals that rely on these resources to ensure that all of our children have a healthy start in life.”
“As a leading institution that trains the nation’s pediatricians and pediatric specialists, Cincinnati Children’s is grateful to Congress for increasing Children’s Hospital Graduate Medical Education funding by more than $30M. This increase is very meaningful to Children’s because it helps us to train the next generation of doctors for children, especially in shortage areas like child psychiatry where the community need is great. We are thankful to Congress that they see pediatric training as a priority,” said Margaret Hostetter, MD, Chair Department of Pediatrics, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
A five-year reauthorization of the program was signed into law in April 2014. While serving in the U.S. House of Representatives as the Ranking Democrat on a key health subcommittee, Brown authored the Children’s Hospitals Education and Research Act of 1998, which first proposed the CHGME program. In March 2015, Brown led 31 Senators in a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee seeking continued funding in fiscal year 2016. Ohio is home to seven institutions that have depended upon on CHGME funds.
Brown has worked to expand access to care for children. In January, Brown joined a bipartisan group of six senators to introduce legislation that would help coordinate care and improve health outcomes for children covered by Medicaid with medically complex conditions – a top legislative priority for these families and children’s hospitals across the country. The Advancing Care for Exceptional Kids Act of 2015, or “ACE Kids Act” would improve care coordination, quality measures, and cost containment for children in Medicaid who need specialized care and often need to cross state lines to get it.
Brown also led efforts in the Senate to extend funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). In February, he introduced the Protecting & Retaining Our Children’s Health Insurance Program (PRO-CHIP) Act. PRO-CHIP would extend funding for CHIP through fiscal year 2019. This bill was the baseline policy for the two-year CHIP extension that passed in April as part of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015.