I have been in Bethesda, MD yesterday and today (actually in a meeting room with no windows) serving as a member of the HRSA Negotiated Rulemaking Committee that is charged with re-writing the federal regulations governing how Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSA) and Medically Underserved Areas (MUA) are designated. The current rules have been in effect since the 1970s.
These designations make communities eligible for federal resources designed to improve access to primary care for underserved communities and populations. Key programs that depend upon these designation methods to allocate resources include Community Health Centers, the National Health Service Corps, and the Medicare HPSA Physician bonus payment. The Negotiated Rulemaking Committee was created by the Affordable Care Act, and we are scheduled to produce our interim rule in October, 2011. Here is a post from the March, 2011 meeting; if you want to know more, you can follow that link to previous meetings (7 meetings since September, 2010). If you followed me over from my blog, you know that I live-blogged these meetings in the past but those long, chaotic posts seem inappropriate for TIE. Instead, here is a pdf with an overview of the first half of the April meeting that ends tomorrow (HRSANegRegAprilmtg1). I will post a second pdf here tomorrow with notes on the remainder of this meeting.
As a side note, I prefer my sausage light on the sage, heavy on the pepper….
