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Committee hears bills to expand primary-care workforce: loan repayment, NP residencies and Medicaid GME support
Summary
The Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers and health center leaders urged support for bills to extend loan-repayment eligibility to more health‑center staff, expand NP residencies and restore Medicaid graduate medical education funding to grow community-based primary-care capacity and retain clinicians in underserved areas.
BOSTON — The committee heard a panel of community health center leaders and residency directors pressing for three related workforce bills: a primary care workforce-development and loan-repayment grant program (H.1410/S.891), a state community health center NP residency statute (discussed earlier), and restoration of Medicaid graduate medical education (GME) support for community-based residency training.
Catherine O’Reilly of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers told members that health centers serve more than 1,000,000 patients across the Commonwealth and that workforce shortages threaten access. The League asked the committee to expand loan-repayment eligibility to nonclinical but essential staff (community health workers, recovery coaches and other paraprofessionals), scale up NP residencies and restore a state Medicaid‑GME match so federally qualified health centers can expand residency training.
Michael McDonald, a behavioral-health clinician at Brockton Neighborhood Health Center and a Mass Repay recipient, said loan-repayment programs made it feasible for him to enter and remain in the field; he urged expanding the program to cover other members of the multidisciplinary team. Nicholas Whydah and other residency directors described Greater Lawrence Family Health Center’s federally qualified-health-center‑based residency and said restoring a Medicaid GME match to reimburse up to 50% of program costs (with federal match) would help retain trainees in community practice; Greater Lawrence reported that nearly all recent family-medicine graduates practice in community health centers or medically underserved areas.
Panelists said these investments will leverage federal dollars (where available), grow locally distributed pipelines of clinicians trained in community settings, and improve retention in underserved regions. Proponents urged the committee to report favorably and to coordinate workforce measures with primary-care payment reform so that newly trained clinicians can be sustainably employed in community settings.
