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Doctor training gets funding

BY JEANNINE KORANDA AND DAVID KLEPPER

Eagle Topeka bureau

TOPEKA - Rural rotations by doctors who get specialized training in Wichita will be funded by $1.5 million included in a health care reform package sent to the governor Saturday.

The unusual move ensures the Wichita Center for Graduate Medical Education will get the money, no matter what happens with the wrap-up budget lawmakers still are hashing out.

South-central Kansas lawmakers say the training program is an important part of the reform package.

"How do you do health care reform if you don't have the doctors to do it?" asked Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita, the House's lead negotiator for the six-member panel that developed the compromise.

The reform package passed the House 104-16. It passed 34-1 in the Senate.

The bill requires insurance companies to offer more policies that can be paid for with pre-tax earnings and calls for more money for programs for poor pregnant women. It expands eligibility for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, though federal funding for the expansion doesn't yet exist.

The bill also helps safety-net clinics, and extends the time people can use COBRA, the stopgap insurance used by many people between jobs.

Only the Wichita doctors' program had money appropriated for it. The $6 million for the other provisions would go through the conventional budget process.

Since most of the bill is so far unfunded, critics called it largely meaningless. The bill pays "lip service to a very critical issue," said Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, the lone Senate vote against it. "If you wanted health care reform this session, this isn't it."

The Wichita Center for Graduate Medical Education has worked all session to make the point that training doctors in Wichita benefits the entire state. It has worked, said the center's lobbyist, former state Sen. Lana Oleen.

"They (the lawmakers) get it that WCGME provides doctors that work in Kansas," she said.

The center's doctors visit 48 Kansas communities. Graduates work in almost all the state's counties.

"They realized that their physicians were trained in Wichita, and they realized that it would be very hard to recruit someone from out of state to their small town," said Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, who led the Senate negotiating team.

The program, originally developed as hands-on training, faces changing rules and growing costs.

The group that accredits medical residency programs has said the center, mostly staffed by volunteer doctors, must add full-time faculty and staff to bolster research, lectures and administration. Meanwhile, the federal government has decreased what it pays when the doctors rotate through rural communities.

The Wichita center, a consortium that coordinates the residency programs in Wichita and Salina for the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita, told lawmakers at the beginning of the session that it needed $9.6 million this year to keep operating.

The money in the reform package will help, as will the $1 million the center received in the main budget bill approved earlier. It plans to seek the remaining money from the Bioscience Authority, which can fund research positions. A decision on the money should come June 5, Oleen said.

The bill also creates a task force that will study how to pay for continuing to train doctors in Kansas -- in Wichita and in other programs.