Gov. Josh Green unveiled an aggressive loan repayment program to attract more doctors to Hawaiʻi than ever before.
The Hawaiʻi Education Loan Repayment Program, or HELP, aims to tackle the state's physician shortage as it's grown from several hundred to above 1,000 over the last decade.
HELP will make Hawaiʻi the first state to offer loan repayment to any health care worker, even those who are still training, according to Dr. Kelley Withy, director of the Area Health Education Center in the Pacific.
“Anything that’s licensed or certified in Hawaiʻi, you can get loan repayment and that has never been done before,” Withy said. “There’s always limitations. You have to work here, you have to be this, you have to do this. So we are opening it up.”
To take part in the program, health care workers must commit to practicing in Hawaiʻi for at least two years and 30% of their patients must have public insurance. This includes Medicare, Medicaid, QUEST, Veterans Administration and TRICARE.
Hawaiʻi residents on Medicaid account for more than 40% of the population, or 465,000 people, according to Green. He announced the details of the loan repayment program at the annual AHEC's Hawaiʻi Health Workforce Summit held last weekend in Honolulu.
Green set aside $30 million for the first two years of the program.
“We reduce the cost of living for health care workers by giving them up to $50,000 per person per year… so that we can promote care for all of those who need it,” Green said. “People have to be taking Medicare or Medicaid to qualify. The reason for that is that that is our universe of people.”
Under the program, a health care worker carrying a quarter million dollars in debt could pay that off in five years by working full-time in primary care, behavioral health or rural Hawaiʻi.
Lee Buenconsejo Lum, interim dean at the University of Hawaiʻi John A. Burns School of Medicine, says about 75% of JABSOM graduates leave Hawaiʻi for their residency. This program will allow these students to practice here in the islands after school, and may also bring Hawaiʻi residents home.
“Residents who have Hawaiʻi ties who are perhaps on the mainland or actually even here, kids start getting some of their loans actually paid off while they’re in residency which is huge,” Buenconsejo Lum said.
“Obviously they have to make the commitment to return home.”
Withy said the greatest challenge in luring health care professionals to Hawaiʻi has been the high cost of living and the lack of commensurate pay. She said a housing and mortgage assistance component to the program is also in the works.
