unable to purchase services. However, over 30 other programs exist. (See appendix for an overview of some of these programs.) These other programs, which collectively spent more than $1 billion a year as of 1996, use one of three strategies aimed to ensure that all populations have access to care. Providing incentives to health professionals practicing in underserved areas. Under the Rural Health Clinic and Medicare Incentive Payment programs, providers are given additional Medicare and/or Medicaid reimbursement to practice in underserved areas. In 1996, these reimbursements amounted to over $400 million. In addition, over $112 million was spent on the National Health Service Corps program, which supports scholarships and repays education loans for health care professionals who agree to practice in designated shortage areas. Under another program, called the J-1 Visa Waiver, U.S. trained foreign physicians are allowed to remain in the United States if they agree to practice in underserved areas. Paying clinics and other providers caring for people who cannot afford to pay. More than $758 million funded programs that provide grants to help underwrite the cost of medical care at community health centers and other federally qualified health centers. These centers also receive higher Medicare and Medicaid payments. Similar providers also receive higher Medicare and Medicaid payments as “look-alikes” under the Federally Qualified Health Center program. Paying institutions to support the education and training of health professionals. Medical schools and other teaching institutions received over $238 million in 1996 to help increase the national supply, distribution, and minority representation of health professionals through various education and training programs under Titles VII and VIII of the Public Health Service Act. number needed to remove federal designation as a shortage area, while 785 shortage areas requesting providers did not receive any providers at all. Of these latter locations, 143 had unsuccessfully requested a National Health Service Corps provider for 3 years or more. Taking other provider placement programs into account shows an even greater problem in effectively distributing scarce provider resources. For example, HHS identified a need for 54 physicians in West Virginia in 1994, but more than twice that number—116 physicians—were placed there using the National Health Service Corps and J-1 Visa Waiver programs. We identified eight states where this occurred in 1995. While almost $2 billion has been spent in the last decade on Title VII and VIII education and training programs, HHS has not gathered the information necessary to evaluate whether these programs had a significant effect on changes that occurred in the national supply, distribution, or minority representation of health professionals or their impact on access to care. Evaluations often did not address these issues, and those that did address them had difficulty establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between federal funding under the programs and any changes that occurred. Such a relationship is difficult to establish because the programs have other objectives besides improving supply, distribution, and minority representation and because no common goals or performance measures for improving access had been established. the problem. Despite 3 decades of federal efforts, the number of areas HHS has classified as underserved using these systems has not decreased. HHS uses two systems to identify and measure underservice: the Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) system and the Medically Underserved Area (MUA) system. First used in 1978 to place National Health Service Corps providers, the HPSA system is based primarily on provider-to- population ratios. In general, HPSAs are self-defined locations with fewer than one primary care physician for every 3,500 persons. Developed at about the same time, the MUA system more broadly identifies areas and populations considered to have inadequate health services, using the additional factors of poverty and infant mortality rates and percentage of population aged 65 or over. We previously reported on the long-standing weaknesses in the HPSA and MUA systems in identifying the types of access problems in communities and in measuring how well programs focus services on the people who need them, including the following: The systems have relied on data that are old and inaccurate. About half of the U.S. counties designated as medically underserved areas since the 1970s would no longer qualify as such if updated using 1990 data. Formulas used by the systems, such as physician-to-population ratios, do not count all primary care providers available in communities, overstating the need for additional physicians in shortage areas by 50 percent or more. The systems fail to count the availability of those providers historically used by the nation to improve access to care, such as National Health Service Corps physicians and U.S. trained foreign physicians, as well as nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and nurse midwives. demand for services. As a result, the systems do not accurately identify whether access problems are common for everyone living in the area, or whether only specific subpopulations, such as the uninsured poor, have difficulty accessing primary care resources that are already there but underutilized. Without additional criteria to identify the type of access barriers existing in a community, programs may not benefit the specific subpopulation with insufficient access to care. The Rural Health Clinic program, established to improve access in remote rural areas, illustrates this problem. Under the program, all providers located in rural HPSAs, MUAs, and HHS-approved state-designated shortage areas can request rural health clinic certification to receive greater Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. However, if the underserved group is the uninsured poor, such reimbursement does little or nothing to address the access problem. Most of the 76 clinics we surveyed said the uninsured poor made up the majority of underserved people in their community, yet only 16 said they offered health services on a sliding-fee scale based on the individual’s ability to pay for care. Even if rural health clinics do not treat the group that is actually underserved, they receive the higher Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, without maximum payment limits if operated by a hospital or other qualifying facility. These payment benefits continue indefinitely, regardless of whether the clinic is no longer in an area that is rural and underserved. Last February, we testified before this Subcommittee that improved cost controls and additional program criteria were needed for the Rural Health Clinic program. In August of this year, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 made changes to the program that were consistent with our recommendations. Specifically, the act placed limits, beginning next January, on the amount of Medicare and Medicaid payments made to clinics owned by hospitals with more than 50 beds. The act also made changes to the program’s eligibility criteria in the following three key areas:In addition to being located in a rural HPSA, MUA, or HHS-approved state-designated shortage area, the clinic must also be in an area in which the HHS Secretary determines there is an insufficient number of health care practitioners. Clinics are allowed only in shortage areas designated within the past 3 years. Existing clinics that are no longer located in rural shortage areas can remain in the program only if they are essential for the delivery of primary care that would otherwise be unavailable in the area, according to criteria that the HHS Secretary must establish in regulations by 1999. Limiting payments will help control program costs. But until, and depending on how, the Secretary defines the types of areas needing rural health clinics, HHS will continue to rely on flawed HPSA and MUA systems that assume providing services to anyone living in a designated shortage area will improve access to care. HHS has been studying changes needed to improve the HPSA and MUA systems for most of this decade, but no formal proposals have been published. In the meantime, new legislation continues to require the use of these systems, thereby increasing the problem. For example, the newly enacted Balanced Budget Act authorizes Medicare to pay for telehealth services—consultative health services through telecommunications with a physician or qualifying provider—for beneficiaries living in rural HPSAs. However, since HPSA qualification standards do not distinguish rural communities that are located near a wide range of specialty providers and facilities from truly remote frontier areas, there is little assurance that the provision will benefit those rural residents most in need of telehealth services. To make the Rural Health Clinic program and other federal programs more accountable for improving access to primary care, HHS will have to devise a better management approach to measure need and evaluate individual program success in meeting this need. If effectively implemented, the management approach called for under the Results Act offers such an opportunity. Under the Results Act, HHS would ask some basic questions about its access programs: What are our goals and how can we achieve them? How can we measure our performance? How will we use that information to improve program management and accountability? These questions would be addressed in annual performance plans that define each year’s goals, link these goals to agency programs, and contain indicators for measuring progress in achieving these goals. Using information on how well programs are working to improve access in communities, program managers can decide whether federal intervention has been successful and can be discontinued, or if other strategies for addressing access barriers that still exist in communities would provide a more effective solution. The Results Act provides an opportunity for HHS to make sure its access programs are on track and to identify how efforts under each program will fit within the broader access goals. The Results Act requires that agencies complete multi-year strategic plans by September 30, 1997, that describe the agency’s overall mission, long-term goals, and strategies for achieving these goals. Once these strategic plans are in place, the Results Act requires that for each fiscal year, beginning fiscal year 1999, agencies prepare annual performance plans that expand on the strategic plans by establishing specific performance goals and measures for program activities set forth in the agencies’ budgets. These goals are to be stated in a way that identifies the results—or outcomes—that are expected, and agencies are to measure these outcomes in evaluating program success. Establishing performance goals and measures such as the following could go far to improve accountability in HHS’ primary access programs.