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The US neurologist shortage is reducing patients' access to care and increasing physician burnout, siphoning off members of a critical workforce that isn't growing fast enough.

Getty Images/Caiaimage Physician and hospital groups are hopeful Congress will approve thousands of additional Graduate Medical Education slots this year which, if successful, would mark one of the biggest expansions to the program seen in decades.   Citing a looming physician shortage, doctors and providers have lobbied Congress for more than a decade to increase the number of residents Medicare helps pay to train. That number has been frozen since 1996 until Congress approved an additional 1,000 slots in December.   Lobbyists say that was the catalyst needed to break a decades-long resis...

email article WASHINGTON -- Healthcare groups are applauding efforts being made in Congress to stop two different cuts to the Medicare budget -- both of which are due to "sequestration" requirements -- before it's too late. One cut, part of the normal budget process, is a 2% -- or $18 billion -- cut in the projected Medicare budget under a process known as "sequestration." Sequestration allows for prespecified cuts in projected agency budget increases if Congress can't agree on their own cuts. Medicare's budget had been slated for a 2% sequester cut in fiscal year 2020; howeve...

Congress breaks two-decade freeze on new Medicare GME slots Print Lawmakers in a massive year-end spending and COVID-19 relief bill added new Medicare GME slots for the first time in two decades. To curtail Medicare spending, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 kept the number of medical residents for existing teaching hospitals at 1996 levels. An exception was made in 1999 to fund more slots at rural teaching hospitals. But for the majority of the more than 1,100 teaching hospitals in the U.S., residency positions have been relatively unchanged for more than two decades. Congress on Monday autho...