Biden-Harris Administration Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Tackles Youth Mental Health Crisis, Maternity Care Deserts, Gaps in Access to Primary Care
Budget also supports rural opioid treatment and recovery initiative, growing the health care workforce, and modernizing the organ transplant system
The President's Fiscal Year 2025 Budget proposal for the Health Resources and Services Administration addresses head-on many of the most pressing health care challenges facing American families, including taking action on:
Youth mental health crisis: Recent data highlights the disturbing trends in youth mental health including nearly one-third of youth reporting experiencing poor mental health and 1 in 5 students reporting seriously considering attempting suicide. To respond to this moment, we need to make mental health and substance use disorder treatment readily available. The keys to increasing access to care are growing the behavioral health workforce and better supporting primary care providers in meeting behavioral health needs. We also need to build supports for young people among those they trust, which is often their peers.
That is why the President's Budget invests in:
- Training 12,000 new behavioral health providers to expand access to behavioral health treatment and services across the country.
- Creating an innovative new youth peer-to-peer mental health support and career pathway program to train youth and young adults to support one another's mental health needs while building an early behavioral health career pathway program for youth peers.
- Supporting mental health training and support for pediatricians where pediatricians can directly access tele-consultation with psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians to support the mental health needs of their young patients and training.
- Making mental health and substance use disorder a required service in community health centers that are the primary source of health care services, regardless of ability to pay, to more than 30 million people—including more than 8.5 million children—in some of the highest need urban and rural communities across the country.
Maternity Care Deserts: More than eight million women of childbearing age live in counties that lack a hospital with labor and delivery services. The March of Dimes estimates that nearly 150,000 babies a year are born in "maternity care deserts" that lack a hospital or birth center providing obstetric care and lack obstetricians or midwives. Well-trained health care providers are essential to improving health outcomes, identifying and addressing pregnancy-related complications, protecting women's health, and ensuring every birth provides the best opportunity for a strong start.
That is why the President's Budget invests in:
- Building obstetric capacity in maternity care deserts to respond to obstetric-related emergencies in rural, urban, and suburban areas without ready access to labor and delivery services.
- Training more Labor and Delivery Nurses and Certified Nurse Midwives to increase access to maternal and perinatal health care, particularly in rural and underserved communities.
- Building a community-based doula workforce to support pregnant individuals and ensure their voices are heard and needs are met.
- Expanding access to maternal mental health support to respond to maternal depression and increase access through the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-TLC-MAMA.
Closing gaps in access to primary care: Delayed care is often the result of barriers such as lack of primary care and behavioral health providers located in many rural or underserved communities, workforce challenges across the health care system, and lack of access to transportation, limited appointment availability, and limited operating hours for patients who require care outside of standard working hours. In 2020, 46 percent of households surveyed nationwide reported negative health consequences as a result of not being able to get an appointment when they needed it.
That is why the President's Budget invests in:
- A plan to create a pathway to double the federal investment in the community health center program to ensure that it can reach over 37 million people in need of and struggling to access primary care.
- Expanding health center street medicine services to ensure people experiencing homelessness have access to primary care.
- Expanding health center hours of operation to make it easier for people who work later shifts or face childcare or transportation issues to access primary care.
Meeting the opioid treatment and recovery needs of rural communities: Opioid use disorder is particularly concerning in rural communities and accessing treatment can be challenging due to geographic isolation, transportation barriers, and limited substance use disorder providers. In support of President Biden's Unity Agenda, HRSA launched a Rural Opioid Treatment and Recovery Initiative to support establishing and expanding comprehensive substance use disorder treatment and recovery services in rural areas, including by increasing access to medications for opioid use disorder, such as buprenorphine.
That is why the President's Budget invests in:
- Creating more access to treatment in rural communities for people to receive medications such as buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder and get recovery supports.
- Supporting rural community activities such as mobile units providing medication for opioid use disorder and integration of this treatment into rural primary care settings.
- Integrating supportive services—such as food access, housing support and employment training and opportunities, transportation to treatment, and other social determinants of health.
- Expanding the rural substance use disorder workforce, including clinical providers and peer support professionals who help individuals find and sustain a path to recovery.
Growing the health care workforce: The National Center for Health Workforce Analysis has identified current projected shortages through 2035 in a wide range of health care occupations. At the same time, many training curricula and models for training health professionals, particularly in medicine, remain unchanged from decades ago; they do not fully leverage the technology available today. HRSA is committed to growing the health care workforce by funding new, leading-edge health profession education and training models and expanding the supply of health care professionals in underserved and rural areas.
That is why the President's Budget invests in:
- Providing scholarships and loan repayment to over 24,000 clinicians, nurses, and health professionals to provide health care in underserved and rural areas.
- Making it possible for more than 1,800 medical and dental residents to work and train in underserved and rural communities.
- Seeding new approaches to recruit and grow the health care workforce and deliver a more modern, robust, and diverse workforce pipeline.
Transforming the Organ Matching System to Better Serve Patients and Families: HRSA oversees the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), which was established by Congress nearly four decades ago and consists of a comprehensive network of transplant professionals and community members charged with increasing organ donation and operating and overseeing a fair and accountable system for allocating and transplanting organs in the United States. Across the nearly 40-year history of the OPTN, all functions of the OPTN have been managed by a single vendor and not competed separately based on technical expertise in areas like IT or operations. In 2023, Congress adopted the Administration's proposal to update the decades-old statute, including allowing HRSA to make multiple different contract awards to benefit from best-in-class vendors in different areas to improve performance and innovation. Congress also adopted HRSA's proposal to require the OPTN Board of Directors support contract be distinct from OPTN operations support contractors to strengthen OPTN accountability and oversight. The new law also eliminated the arbitrary appropriation cap to support this work.
That is why the President's Budget invests in:
- Doubling funding for the organ transplant system to increase competition and better serve the more than 100,000 people on the organ donor waitlist.
Read HRSA's FY 2025 Congressional Budget Justification.
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