The National Health Service Corps (NHSC) provides scholarships and loan repayments to health care providers in exchange for a period of service in a health professional shortage area (HPSA). The program places clinicians at facilities—generally not-for-profit or government-operated— that might otherwise have difficulties recruiting and retaining providers.
The NHSC is administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Congress created the NHSC in the Emergency Health Personnel Act of 1970 (P.L. 91-623), and its programs have been reauthorized and amended several times since then.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA; P.L. 111-148) permanently reauthorized the NHSC. Prior to the ACA, the NHSC had been funded with discretionary appropriations. The ACA created a new mandatory funding source for the NHSC—the Community Health Center Fund (CHCF), which was intended to supplement the program’s annual appropriation. However, since FY2012, the CHCF has entirely replaced the NHSC’s discretionary appropriation.
The CHCF is time-limited. Initially an appropriation from FY2011 through FY2015, the CHCF was subsequently extended in the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA, P.L. 114-10) for two years (FY2016 and FY2017). As of the date of this report, no funding has been approved for the NHSC in FY2018. The program does not currently receive discretionary appropriations; consequently, funding for this program was not included in the continuing resolution for FY2018 (P.L. 115-56).
From FY2011 through FY2016, the most recent year of final data available, the NHSC offered more than 33,500 loan repayment agreements and scholarship awards to individuals who have agreed to serve for a minimum of two years in a HPSA. In FY2016, the NHSC made 6,129 awards. The number of awards the NHSC makes is only one component of program size, because not all awardees are currently serving as NHSC providers; some are still completing their training (e.g., scholarship award recipients). As such, the NHSC also measures its field strength: the number of NHSC providers who are fulfilling a service obligation in a HPSA in a given year. In FY2016, total NHSC field strength was 10,493. NHSC providers are currently serving in a variety of settings throughout the entire United States and its territories. The majority of NHSC providers serve in outpatient settings, most commonly at federally qualified health centers
