In states across the country, legislators, hospital and health care groups, and others are objecting to the plans their state governments submitted to the federal government for how they would like to spend Rural Health Transformation funds – plans that federal regulators have already approved.
In Colorado, Michigan, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming, legislators have even threatened to withhold the enabling legislation needed to spend the federal money.
One of their primary objections is that the approved Rural Health Transformation program plans, consistent with federal guidelines, focus on innovation in the delivery of rural health care and do not help address the financial challenges that rural hospitals already face.
Congress established the Rural Health Transformation program to distribute $50 billion in federal funds after Congress stripped $1 trillion in federal health care spending over the next ten years through its passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Now, state officials and health care groups are saying that the $50 billion is not enough money and is not being spent in ways that can best meet the needs of the residents of rural America.
Meanwhile, federal officials warn that states could lose the funding already awarded to them if they change their spending plans in ways that differ significantly from what regulators have already approved.
Learn more about the challenges being raised against Rural Health Transformation Program funding from the KFF Health News article “Lawmakers, Health Groups Resist Their States’ Rural Health Fund Plans.”