
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has both the opportunity and the obligation to leverage its existing authority to establish GME caps in order to strategically target additional support to areas with the greatest need across the country.
Specifically, CMS should allow new GME teaching hospitals located in areas of need, to extend their cap-building window for up to an additional five years beyond the current window (for a total of up to ten years). This would include GME programs currently in their cap-building window.
Injecting flexibility into the cap-building process provides CMS with the ability to supplement the current broad-based cap-building window with a tailored policy designed to target federal funding (while keeping control over incremental costs) to the areas of highest need.