Rural hospitals

Federal Health Policy Update for May 21

The following is the latest health policy news from the federal government for May 15-21. Some of the language used below is taken directly from government documents. Congress The House Ways and Means Committee marked up several health care bills addressing issues such as durable medical equipment (DME) and home health fraud. A discussion draft that would have required non-profit hospitals and health systems to provide additional reporting on community benefit spending was removed from the list of measures considered. See all the marked-up bills and a recording of the meeting on the committee’s website here. Ways & Means expects [...]

joe2026-05-21T16:10:09-04:00May 21, 2026|Affordable Care Act, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMMI, Medicaid, Medicaid managed care, Medicaid regulations, Medicare reimbursement policy|

HHS Examines Why Rural Hospitals Close

Why are rural hospitals closing at a much faster rate than their non-rural counterparts? The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation recently explored this question with an intensive data-based approach that yielded the following conclusions about rural hospital closures between 2012 and 2023 (all bullets are direct quotes from the agency’s report): Rural hospitals face unique challenges that make them especially vulnerable to closure or conversion to outpatient-only facilities. While 8% of rural hospitals have closed or converted since 2010, only 3.5% of urban hospitals have done so during the same [...]

joe2026-05-20T09:01:47-04:00May 21, 2026|hospitals|

“Rural Emergency Hospital” Designation Making a Difference for Some Communities

The new (since 2023) classification of some hospitals as “Rural Emergency Hospitals” is proving to be an effective tool for preserving access to care in some rural communities. The program, introduced to help stem the closure of rural hospitals, which was leaving many communities without reasonable access to care, appears to be having the desired effect. Among the benefits reported by the administrators of such hospitals – which must apply for this special federal designation – are preservation of access to emergency and outpatient services, including surgery, laboratory, imaging, and therapy, in communities where they were otherwise in jeopardy; financial [...]

joe2026-03-11T11:18:59-04:00March 12, 2026|340b, hospitals, Medicare|

Rural Health Transformation Plans Face Pushback

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 [...]

joe2026-03-04T12:23:38-05:00March 5, 2026|Congress, hospitals|

Non-Profit Hospitals Face Near-Term Challenges

The end of Affordable Care Act enhanced health insurance premiums will pose a financial challenge for many of the nation’s non-profit hospitals. The challenge to hospitals will be greatest in states that did not take advantage of Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion and those with especially large concentrations of rural hospitals that also lack a robust health care safety net. On safer ground will be hospitals in states that do have strong health care safety nets or that have taken recent steps to attempt to fill the void left by the expired insurance premium subsidies. Learn more about the challenges [...]

joe2026-02-05T15:07:41-05:00February 9, 2026|Affordable Care Act, hospitals, Medicaid|

Erosion of Rural Maternity Care Continues

At a rate of more than two a month since the end of 2020, rural hospitals have closed or announced that they will be closing their maternity units – 124 in all by the end of 2026. As a result, today only a little more than 40 percent of rural hospitals – most of them safety-net hospitals – continue to provide maternity services, with fewer than a third of such rural hospitals doing so in 12 states. The hospitals blame a number of factors for this continued erosion, including inadequate private insurance and Medicaid payments and difficulty recruiting the providers [...]

joe2026-01-27T16:25:01-05:00January 28, 2026|hospitals, Medicaid|

Urban Safety-Net Hospitals Most Vulnerable to Looming Health Care Cuts

While a great deal of attention has been paid to the potential implications for rural hospitals of the coming $1 trillion in federal health care spending cuts over the next decade, it turns out that urban safety-net hospitals, not rural hospitals, may be even more vulnerable to the effects of these cuts. According to an analysis by the New York Times and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, of the 109 hospitals in the country that will be most vulnerable to these cuts, 85 percent are urban safety-net hospitals and not rural hospitals. Three factors drive this vulnerability: their [...]

joe2025-12-04T16:51:55-05:00December 8, 2025|Congress, hospitals, Medicaid|

Labor and Delivery Situation Worsens at Rural Hospitals

Rural America continues to experience the loss of hospital labor and delivery services. With 2025 not yet over, more rural hospitals – 27 – have closed or are in the process of closing their labor and delivery services than did so in 2024 (21). As a result, only 41 percent of the nearly 2400 rural hospitals in the country today provide labor and delivery services. Of the remaining 900 hospitals still providing these services, 127 of them – 13 percent – are considered to be at risk of closing those services. As a result of this shortage, pregnant women face [...]

joe2025-11-12T12:40:41-05:00November 13, 2025|hospitals|

Impact of H-1B Visa Fee on Hospitals in Underserved and Rural Areas

The new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas is expected to detract from the ability of providers in low-income and rural areas to serve their communities. Providers – especially hospitals – in such areas typically operate on very low margins and always have trouble recruiting physicians and other highly skilled providers and often turn to international medical graduates in search of help. In fact, a 2021 study published by the National Institutes of Health reported that nearly two-thirds of international medical graduates practiced in areas designated as health professional shortage areas or medically underserved areas, with nearly half practicing in rural [...]

joe2025-10-28T11:46:55-04:00October 28, 2025|hospitals|

The New Rural Health Fund

Recognizing that the Medicaid and other health care cuts in the recently enacted FY 2026 budget reconciliation bill – the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill – will exact a heavy toll on rural hospitals, Congress included in that bill a short-term Rural Health Fund designed to help ameliorate the impact of some of the cuts it was adopting. KFF Health has taken a closer look at the Rural Health Fund, how it is structured, and how it is expected to work and has identified some of the bill’s major components. They include: The rural health fund includes $50 billion, which [...]

joe2025-07-23T10:30:29-04:00July 23, 2025|Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Congress, hospitals, Medicaid|