Authorizing Secretary of the Interior to Establish Fees for Medical Services Provided in Units of the National Park System

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3607) to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to establish fees for medical services provided in units of the National Park System, and for other purposes, as amended.

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Mr. Speaker, the National Park Service currently manages 11 units that provide medical services to park visitors, employees, and nearby residents, including Yosemite in my district, Yellowstone, Zion, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. These include a wide range of services, including emergency medical services, ambulance transport, and clinical services. They treat colds; they set broken bones; they stabilize heart attacks and strokes; they evacuate the severely injured and treat thousands of patients annually.

These national park units are typically located in remote areas, which means that they are often the only option patients have to receive timely medical care, especially in emergency situations.

In the case of Yosemite, the medical clinic has operated in the valley since 1929. Like other medical clinics in our national parks, it serves the park and concessionaire employees, their families, and tens of thousands of daily park visitors.

The Yosemite medical clinic is a million-dollar-a-year operation, maintaining a full-time staff and sophisticated medical treatment to treat and stabilize any number of serious injuries and sudden illnesses that confront a population of a moderately sized town.

But here is the problem: Any other medical clinic would be able to use the fees it collects to finance its operations, to plan for amortizing equipment purchases and expansions, and to match its expenses to the revenues it generates, but not so our national park medical clinics.

Under current law, the fees collected by our national park clinics must go directly to the national Treasury, and the parks must then rely on annual appropriations to replace those funds, with no certainty they will return and no ability to plan long-term improvements.

This bill changes all of that. It would establish a separate trust fund in the Treasury, still under the control of Congress but dedicated to be returned to the clinics that generate these funds in the first place. H.R. 3607 will allow the National Park Service to retain revenues to help offset the costs of providing medical services.

It establishes a national park medical services fund at the Treasury. The fund will consist of fees collected for medical services provided to persons in units of the National Park System and through other donations.

My bill will help the National Park Service to provide higher quality patient care with industry standard equipment and technology; assist with training relating to providing the necessary medical services; develop management plans for medical facilities; and obtain or improve medical facilities, equipment, vehicles, and other needs and costs of providing medical services to visitors and staff of our national parks.

Mr. Speaker, I urge adoption of this measure, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Hawaii for her kind words and support, and I urge adoption of the measure.

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