House Restores Rural Health Funding

The House of Representatives has reached a bipartisan agreement to fund the Department of Health and Human Services, restoring support for rural programs to the levels in place before last year's administration cuts. Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, gives further insight on this funding.

“Certainly we want to be able to it does this new house bill does not roll back all the Medicaid cuts. I want to be clear on that so those are still coming on. But what it does do is it actually funds a number of targeted programs towards rural hospitals and rural clinicians in particular, additional workforce and recruitment programs to get those clinicians out so they'll have to go now in tandem with this new transformation funding.”

The funding will directly support hospitals, including the small hospital improvement program and a Medicare rural hospital flexibility program.

“Their focus is maintaining that access to care. How do we keep the doors open on that hospital? And it's a largely providing additional technical assistance, technical resources on how to do both their workforce and their accounting, and their equipment management systems within the facility. So it's all really, really important.”

Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association.