Iowa Senator Joni Ernst says she’s introducing bipartisan legislation to help address the state’s chronic shortage of physicians.
Ernst says the legislation focuses on a waiver program that grants foreign doctors who attended medical school in the U.S. the ability to stay in the country for three years if they work in an area with a shortage of doctors. Every state gets 30 slots, but not every state uses all their allocated slots. “We have many states out there, just for example, Georgia, Nebraska, they don’t use all of their slots. And those are just slots that we desperately need,” she says.
Legislation co-sponsored by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, would allow unused waiver slots to be transferred to states like Iowa.
“We know that our communities suffer when they don’t have access to health care. So if we don’t have those, whether it’s a county hospital or a larger enterprise in our metro areas, people won’t, they won’t live there,” Ernst says.
The National Center for Health Statistics says Iowa has one of the lowest rates of physicians in the country.
(By Natalie Krebs, Iowa Public Radio)