On Dec. 29, the administration announced the amounts distributed to each state in the program’s first year. Awards averaged about $200 million per state, with totals ranging from $147 million to $281 million.
“We are getting rural communities the health support they need, and we’re getting it immediately,” Trump said. “These funds will go to empowering rural hospitals, strengthening their workforce, modernizing facilities and technology, and ensuring that rural Americans get world-class healthcare in their own community, right smack in their own community like they’ve never had it before, and they’ve been hurt very badly by the Affordable Care Act.”
The rural health fund will provide an additional $10 billion annually from 2026 through 2030.
The program will not make direct payments to rural hospitals but instead distribute funding to states, which submitted detailed “rural health transformation plans” to CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, who also attended the roundtable.
In a message aimed at midterm voters, Trump blamed Democrats for “hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud” stemming from the Affordable Care Act, which he referred to as the “Unaffordable Care Act,” and noted that no Democrats voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Continue reading…
