Paving the Path for Primary Care Sustainability: Aledade Policy Institute Helps Enact Arkansas Bill to Strengthen Primary Care

By Jennifer Lyons, Senior State Policy Analyst

A Win for Primary Care: Celebrating the Enactment of Arkansas SB264

April 9 was a historic day in Arkansas and a significant moment for primary care across the nation.

On that day, the Arkansas legislature took an exciting step forward to strengthen primary care by enacting Senate Bill 264 (SB264). The bill passed overwhelmingly in the Arkansas Senate and House of Representatives with bipartisan support, and paves a path for primary care clinicians to provide more comprehensive, high-quality care to Arkansans.

The legislation establishes a Primary Care Payment Improvement Working Group, which will convene primary care clinicians, payers and state partners to define, measure and report primary care spending and determine an appropriate target for future investment.  

The Critical Need for Primary Care Investment

For too long, primary care has been an undervalued cornerstone of the health care system. While nationally, primary care accounts for 35 percent of all annual health care visits, it receives on average less than 5 percent of total health care spending. Physician payments are also not keeping up with the rapidly rising costs of operating a practice—when adjusted for inflation in practice costs, Medicare primary care physician payment rates have declined by nearly 30 percent over the last two decades, compounding the operational burden.

The result? Poor access to care, worsening health outcomes and a primary care workforce that is overburdened and understaffed. As the recent annual primary care scorecard report from the Milbank Memorial Fund suggests, the primary care workforce is in crisis—practices are struggling to attract and retain clinical staff. Understaffed practices lead to clinicians being administratively strained and having less time to spend providing needed care to their patients.

Arkansas has certainly felt these effects, consistently being ranked among the least healthy states in the past several years.

With this bill, Arkansas joins a growing number of states taking steps to achieve primary care sustainability through increased investment. More than 20 other states have taken a measure to advance primary care investment, and Arkansas is among the first Southeast states to do so.

Looking Ahead: Continued Collaborations to Strengthen Primary Care

The Arkansas win represents a crucial first step for strengthening primary care, in this state and in others. This success serves to inform the bipartisan strategy and approach to increase primary care investment among other states, and the Aledade Policy Institute will apply learnings from this effort in our strategy to advance sustainable primary care nationwide.

Increasing primary care investment is a leading priority of the Aledade Policy Institute. To learn more about our advocacy work and how to get involved, contact policy@aledade.com.