RAPID CITY, S.D. — Echo Kopplin wants South Dakota’s leaders to know that money from a new $50 billion federal rural health fund should help residents with limited transportation options.
Kopplin, a physician assistant who works with seniors, low-income people, and mental health patients in the rural Black Hills, shared her thoughts at a meeting hosted by state officials.
South Dakota’s leaders did a “good job of diving in” and asking questions to get “deeper at the root of the problem,” she said.
Kopplin later told KFF Health News how one of her rural patients recently missed two appointments because of a broken-down car and no access to public transportation.
Echo Kopplin, a physician assistant in rural South Dakota, says she’s glad officials hosted public meetings across the state to hear from “front-line workers” before crafting their application to the Rural Health Transformation Program.(Echo Kopplin)
Nationwide, health care workers like Kopplin and thousands of others — from patient advocates to technology executives — flocked to town halls or online portals during the seven weeks state leaders had to craft and submit their applications for the Rural Health Transformation Program to the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. That deadline was Nov. 5.
“We will give $50 billion away by the end of the year,” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said Nov. 6 at a Milken Institute event in Washington. He said all 50 states had submitted applications.
The program will “allow us to right-size the health care system,” Oz said, adding that innovations from the rural work “will spill over to suburban and urban America as well.”
Among applications and summaries publicly shared by states, themes include workforce development, telehealth, and access to healthy food. In Kansas, leaders want to build a “Food is Medicine” program. Wyoming officials propose a new program called “BearCare,” a state-sponsored health insurance plan that patients could use only after medical emergencies.
But many health policy experts and Democrats are raising alarms that the Republican-backed program will become a “slush fund.” Critics worry it will fail to reach the small-town patients they say need it most, especially as states face nearly a trillion dollars in Medicaid spending reductions over the next decade. Medicaid, a joint federal-state program, serves nearly 1 in 4 rural Americans.
“The status quo is tremendous distress in rural communities,” said Heather Howard, a professor of the practice at Princeton University and director of the university’s State Health and Value Strategies program, which is tracking the rural health fund. The new funding won’t be enough to offset the Med …