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- Tyler Dedrick reports on a new study showing that the Rural Health Transformation Program will not adequately serve rural communities with high mortality rates.
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A new study shows that a multi-billion federal initiative to fund rural healthcare systems won’t be distributed equally to places most in need, or rural communities with high mortality rates.
The funds will be distributed to states this year by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) through Rural Health Transformation Program, a 5-year, $50-billion-dollar federal initiative intended to, according to the CMS website, “strengthen rural communities across America by improving healthcare access, quality, and outcomes.”
The U.S. Senate added The Rural Health Transformation Program at the last minute to Congress’ 2025 budget reconciliation bill in response to concerns that proposed Medicaid funding cuts would severely impact rural health systems.
In its first year, the $10 billion fund provides $100 million to each state as a baseline, plus additional funding which varies from state to state based on rural and proposal-based scoring systems.
But researchers in Pennsylvania analyzed the fund’s disbursements and found the program is not directing the most help to the rural places with the worst health and greatest needs. Looking at 2026 funding allocations, they found that the worse a state ranked in a variety of measures of health, the less funding the state was slated to receive per rural resident.
The researchers looked at state mortality rates — rates at which residents die, adjusted for age — and changes in rural hospital beds and physicians, as well as projected decreases in federal spending on Medicaid, an insurance subsidy program for low-income people and other high-need populations like children and pregnant women.
Dr. Paula Chatterjee, one of the authors of the study, said her team wanted to know if the program’s funding was going to reach rural communities that could most benefit from it.
“You want to know whether this huge investment is going to reach rural communities that might be suffering from some of the largest health challenges,” Chatterjee said, regarding the challenges of rural communities with high mortality.
Read the full article about the Rural Health Transformation Program by Tyler Dedrick at The Daily Yonder.