Reform bill addresses impact on rural areas

In the medical community, it's no secret many rural areas are facing crisis level workforce shortages and the need for health professionals will drastically change when everyone has health insurance.

According to Executive Director of the Virginia Rural Health Association, Beth O’Connor, recruiting doctors to small towns has been an issue for a while.

She says it's not just about quality of life for doctors, but they simply make more money as a specialist or at a hospital, in say, Fairfax.

“They have to be able to repay their student loans, they have to be able to buy malpractice insurance, they have many, many issues, that when you're in a small rural area with a lower volume of patients sometimes it's harder for them to keep up,” says O’Connor.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is designed to do two things for rural America.

First, solve the workforce shortage predicament.

Second, eliminate serious payment inequities.

O’Connor says ending rural doctor shortages starts with medical students.

“Some of the funds in the health reform bill are looking at what you call grow your own programs,” O’Connor explained.

Meaning, a medical school has money to recruit someone like Todd Fridley.

He’s from a small town and plans to return home to practice medicine.

“Once I realized that I wanted to go into medicine I knew that I wanted to go back home to Alleghany,” Fridley said.

“If you take a kid from Arlington and try to place them in Dickenson County you're probably not going to be very successful, but if you take a kid from Dickenson County and put them through nursing school, medical school, whatever type of education that you're trying to fill and try to place them back in the same area you're going to be much more successful,” said O’Connor.

The new reform law gives the National Health Service Core money to pay the loans of medical students or other professionals that agree to work in what are called "Health Professional Shortage Areas".

It's also aimed to help develop new residency programs in rural health clinics.

Getting docs into a small town is the first problem, but once they get there, O'connor says there are serious payment inequities, because more folks in rural areas are on Medicare and Medicaid.

The bill includes an extra 10 percent bonus payment for health professionals practicing in shortage areas where more than half of their patients are on government plans.

With these incentives in place folks will not only have access to health insurance, but a doctor as well.