nsuring Access to Quality Health Care

Ensuring Access to Quality Health Care

As your Congressman, providing quality, affordable health care to our rural areas is of vital importance to me and this week I was proud to vote with my House colleagues to pass the Fiscal Year 2006 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Conference Report, which among other things provides needed funding increases for rural health care.

Provisions in the bill include restoring $9 million in funding for the Office of Rural Health Research and Policy - an important office in Health and Human Services that ensures rural America has a coordinated voice on national rural health issues. The office also plays a critical role in disseminating information to ensure rural citizens can make informed decisions about the new Medicare benefits.

The bill also adds $28.5 million for Rural Health Outreach Grants. This program is one of the few federal grant programs solely focused on providing targeted, flexible resources to support innovative rural health solutions in communities across the county. The conference report also provides $29 million for area health education centers, which provide education and training to health care professionals in community settings while encouraging them to work in rural areas.

Rural areas also benefit greatly from services provided by Community Health Centers and to that end the conference report included a $66 million increase for their construction and operation. Finally, the report included $41 million for medical training to give current and future health care professionals expanded educational opportunities.

In addition to voting for the conference report, this week I signed on to co-sponsor two other pieces of legislation that benefit rural communities. The first is H.R. 2671, the Vision Preservation Act of 2005. This legislation expands federal programs to increase awareness of vision problems, expands the research into the prevention and management of vision loss and expands maternal and child health service block grants to include vision screening.

The second bill is H.R. 1264, the Direct Support Professionals Fairness and Security Act of 2005. Direct support professionals provide services to individuals with disabilities and in the 18th District these professionals' wages are particularly low. This legislation will give states the option to accept funding to increase the wages of public direct service professionals so they are more in line with what their counterparts in the private sector make.

Making sure all Americans, especially those in rural areas, have quality health care is always a challenge, but the legislation passed this week is an important step in providing necessary funding for health care programs. I encourage my colleagues to also pass the Vision Preservation and the Direct Support Professionals Fairness and Security Acts so we can continue to move forward on making rural health care better.

http://ney.house.gov/NewsCenter.aspx?A=421