July 24, 2025
What You Need to Know: Congress has reintroduced a bipartisan bill to expand Medicare-funded residency slots by 14,000 over the next seven years. If passed, this would be the most significant step taken in decades to help to address the growing physician shortage and widen access to care, especially in rural and underserved areas.
For decades, the number of Medicare-funded residency slots has remained effectively frozen, creating a bottleneck that’s worsened the country’s physician shortage and left aspiring doctors with fewer pathways to practice.
Recently, Congress revived H.R. 3890, the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act, a bipartisan bill that would add 14,000 new Medicare-supported residency slots over the next seven years—marking the most significant expansion of the physician training pipeline in nearly 30 years.
The bill would increase the number of available slots by 2,000 each year from 2026 through 2032, with at least 10% of those new positions directed toward hospitals in rural areas, medically underserved communities and regions with new medical schools. It also limits each hospital to a maximum of 75 additional slots over the seven-year period.
The California Medical Association (CMA) has long pushed for this kind of investment. With the U.S. facing a projected shortfall of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, expanding graduate medical education (GME) is no longer optional if we hope to close that gap and ensure that patient access to care does not continue to erode.
The bill also makes permanent the Rural Residency Planning and Development (RRPD) Program, which supports the creation of new rural training tracks to encourage physicians to practice in hard-to-reach regions.
If passed, the legislation would mark a rare and long-overdue federal investment in physician workforce development. Medicare has supported residency training since the program’s inception in 1965, but a cap imposed by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 has constrained the growth of GME ever since. Only small increments—1,000 slots in 2021 and another 200 in 2023—have been added since.
This bipartisan proposal is backed by more than 200 members of Congress.
At the same time, CMA’s philanthropic arm—Physicians for a Healthy California—is gearing up for a major expansion of its GME grant programs, funded by last year’s Prop. 35. Look for more information on the upcoming grant cycles very soon.