Much to like in Think New Mexico’s plans to address medical provider shortage

New Mexico’s medical provider shortage remains a critical issue. While many changes were undertaken during the 2023 legislative session to address the shortage of medical providers, the fact is that New Mexico continues to suffer from a relative lack of medical providers. To be sure, New Mexico is NOT alone in this matter. For a variety of reasons there is a national shortage. And, to be clear the Rio Grande Foundation has spent considerable time on the topic with an analysis of the shortage here and our own report on some solutions (including a handful that were enacted in 2023) here.

Think New Mexico’s report is a useful addition to the conversation about how to further build on 2023’s important reforms (and make sure those gains are locked in). Ideas include:

• Further reforms to New Mexico’s medical malpractice law;
• Join All Ten Major Interstate Health Care Worker Compacts;
• Create a Centralized Credentialing System;
• Make New Mexico’s Tax Policy More Friendly to Health Care Workers (this includes making the gross receipts tax exemption for medical providers permanent, a policy RGF has long-supported);
• Enhance Medicaid Reimbursement & Reduce Claim Denial Rates;
• Increase the number of medical professionals through internal development as well as bringing them in from abroad;
• Create a “permanent fund” for health care.

Overall, RGF supports an overwhelming majority of this report. We have written about and argued for several of these ideas in our own papers which are linked in this post. Our critiques are as follows:

Medical licensing should be limited and often eliminated entirely. Compacts and centralized credentialing are 2nd-best options.

Medicaid should be reduced as a force in New Mexico’s health care system by encouraging people to work and by making the system less generous relative to other health care options. That said, increasing reimbursements to medical professionals will have a positive impact on medical providers.

We DO NOT like the idea of a permanent fund for health care and have a very different view of existing permanent funds from that outlined in this report.

Overall, there is a lot of good information in this report.