At the request of the Health Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, the National Association of Urban Hospitals has written to the committee to convey its views on H.R. 3292, the Medicare IME Pool Act of 2015.

In its letter, NAUH expressed concern about a number of aspects of the proposed legislation, including:

  • NAUH Logoits separation of indirect medical education (IME) payments from Medicare costs by making those payments as lump-sum rather than add-on payments;
  • its failure to recognize teaching intensity in the hospitals at which medical residents train as part of the basis of IME payments; and
  • its distribution of too much IME money to hospitals that train relatively few medical residents and employ those residents to provide care only to modest numbers of Medicare payments at the expense of large urban safety-net hospitals that train large numbers of medical residents and provide significant amounts of care to low-income Medicare patients.

See the complete text of NAUH’s letter here, on the association’s web site.