- Social Factors Help Explain Worse Cardiovascular Health among Adults in Rural Vs. Urban Communities
- Reducing Barriers to Participation in Population-Based Total Cost of Care (PB-TCOC) Models and Supporting Primary and Specialty Care Transformation: Request for Input
- Secretary Kennedy Renews Public Health Emergency Declaration to Address National Opioid Crisis
- Secretary Kennedy Renews Public Health Emergency Declaration to Address National Opioid Crisis
- 2025 Marketplace Integrity and Affordability Proposed Rule
- Rural America Faces Growing Shortage of Eye Surgeons
- NRHA Continues Partnership to Advance Rural Oral Health
- Comments Requested on Mobile Crisis Team Services: An Implementation Toolkit Draft
- Q&A: What Are the Challenges and Opportunities of Small-Town Philanthropy?
- HRSA Administrator Carole Johnson, Joined by Co-Chair of the Congressional Black Maternal Health Caucus Congresswoman Lauren Underwood, Announces New Funding, Policy Action, and Report to Mark Landmark Year of HRSA's Enhancing Maternal Health Initiative
- Biden-Harris Administration Announces $60 Million Investment for Adding Early Morning, Night, and Weekend Hours at Community Health Centers
- Volunteer Opportunity for HUD's Office of Housing Counseling Tribe and TDHE Certification Exam
- Who Needs Dry January More: Rural or Urban Drinkers?
- Rural Families Have 'Critical' Need for More Hospice, Respite Care
- States Help Child Care Centers Expand in Bid To Create More Slots, Lower Prices
USDA/NRHA Rural Hospital Technical Assistance
– Ongoing. Through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) supports technical assistance for rural hospitals to identify and address local health care needs and strengthen health care systems. The overall goal of the program is to enhance hospital systems for improved efficiency and financial performance, bolster quality of care, and support communities.
New State Fact Sheets from USDA
The Economic Research Service (ERS) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regularly updates data on population, income, poverty, food security, education, employment/unemployment, farm characteristics, farm financial indicators, and agricultural exports for all states and includes breakouts for rural and metropolitan areas. County-level Data Sets include poverty estimates, unemployment, and median household income. A separate ERS report examines the Trends and Patterns of Job Quality in the United States, including wages, employer sponsored health insurance coverage, and retirement benefits between 2000 and 2022.
CMS Connecting Kids to Coverage
– Apply by March 7. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will award a total of $66.3 million in grants and cooperative agreements to educate families about the availability of free or low-cost health coverage under Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Eligibility includes State, local, and Tribal governments; Federal health safety net organizations; nonprofits and faith-based organizations; and elementary or secondary schools. A webinar for applicants will be held today at 1:00 pm Eastern.
DEA, HHS Finalize Expansion of Buprenorphine Treatment via Telemedicine
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) are amending their regulations to expand the circumstances under which practitioners registered by the Drug Enforcement Administration are authorized to prescribe schedule III-V controlled substances approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of opioid use disorder via telemedicine, including an audio-only telemedicine encounter. Under these new regulations, after a practitioner reviews the patient’s prescription drug monitoring program data for the state in which the patient is located, the practitioner may prescribe an initial six-month supply of such medications (split amongst several prescriptions totaling six calendar months) through audio-only means.
Research Brief Highlights Language Spoken in Pennsylvania
The U.S. Census Bureau released the 2019-2023 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates last December, providing updated insights into demographic trends across Pennsylvania. Our latest brief highlights trends in languages spoken at home and English proficiency levels across the Commonwealth, counties, and school districts.
Key Findings from the Report:
- Over 12 percent of Pennsylvanians aged five and older speak a language other than English at home, with Spanish being the most common (5.4%).
- More than one-third of non-English speakers (39.1%) are considered limited English proficient (LEP), meaning they speak English “less than very well.”
For more information on LEP in Pennsylvania, read this month’s brief
CMS Releases Announcement on Federal Navigator Program Funding
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today announced a reduction in funding for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Navigator program to $10 million. The savings from this reduction will allow the Federally-facilitated Exchanges (FFEs) to focus on more effective strategies that improve Exchange outcomes and to reduce the user fee in future years, which would translate into a reduction in premium. This change will directly benefit people enrolled without subsidies who pay the full premium for their health insurance. In addition, lower premiums will reduce the burden on hardworking American taxpayers who fund the premium subsidies through the FFEs.
Despite receiving $98 million in the 2024 plan year, Navigators only enrolled 92,000 consumers—just 0.6 percent of plan selections through the FFEs during the open enrollment period—at a cost of $1,061 per enrollment. Additionally, the average cost per enrollment exceeded $3,000 for 12 of the 56 Navigator grantee organizations. Looking back at the grant period covering the 2019 plan year—the year before the COVID-19 pandemic under a similar regulatory approach—Navigators likewise enrolled 0.6 percent of total enrollments through the FFEs at a substantially lower cost of $10 million. This previous grant funding level reflects a far more efficient $211 per enrollment.
The Navigator program is funded by user fees, and the decrease in funding to $10 million per year will save a total of $360 million over the next four years of the five-year period of performance, which began August 27, 2024, and runs through August 26, 2029. Because the user fee is directly passed through to the premium that health insurers charge, the savings from the Navigator program supports lower premiums for consumers in the individual health insurance market. People who do not qualify for federal premium subsidies will directly benefit from lower premiums. Lower premiums will also translate to less federal spending on premium subsidies. This change is for Navigators in the states with FFEs in the next grant period for plan year 2026. States operating state-based exchanges and state-based exchanges operating on the federal platform are responsible for determining the funding available for Navigator programs in their states.
Additional performance data for Navigators further supports this reduction. Data show that for the 2019 plan year, Navigators provided post-enrollment assistance to approximately 205,000 consumers. Despite markedly more funding and substantially higher enrollment levels, the level of post-enrollment assistance dropped to approximately 86,000 consumers for the 2024 plan year.
Overall, Navigator performance data shows that the current level of funding does not represent a reasonable return on investment. These numbers indicate that Navigators are not enrolling nearly enough people to justify the substantial amount of federal dollars previously spent on the program. This reduction will ensure funding is focused on meeting the statutory goals of the program more efficiently and effectively.
In coordination with this announcement, CMS is posting updated Navigator funding, enrollment, and service-level data for the grant periods covering the 2017 plan year to the 2024 plan year.
To view the data, visit 2024 Navigator Funding and Enrollment Data.
432 Rural Hospitals at Risk of Closure; Breakdown By State
From Becker’s Financial Management
There are 432 rural hospitals vulnerable to closure, according to a Feb. 11 report from Chartis, a healthcare advisory services firm.
Chartis analyzed 15 vulnerability indicators and found that 10 were statistically significant in predicting hospital closures, including: Medicaid expansion status, average length of stay, occupancy, percentage change in net patient revenue and years of negative operating margin.
Of the 48 states with rural hospitals, 38 have at least one at risk of closure, according to the report. The states with the highest number of vulnerable hospitals are:
- Texas: 47
- Kansas: 46
- Mississippi: 28
- Oklahoma: 23
- Georgia: 22
Arkansas (50%) has the highest percentage of rural hospitals at risk of closure, followed by Mississippi (47%) and Kansas (47%).
The percentage of rural hospitals at risk of closure by state is as follows:
More than 41% of hospitals
- Arkansas
- Florida
- Kansas
- Mississippi
- Tennessee
31% to 40%
- Georgia
- Missouri
- Oklahoma
- South Carolina
- Texas
26%-30%
- Alabama
- North Carolina
- South Dakota
21%-25%
- Illinois
- Louisiana
- Maryland
- Nebraska
- New Mexico
- Wyoming
16%-20%
- Kentucky
- Ohio
10%-15%
- California
- Indiana
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Montana
- New York
- Pennsylvania
- Virginia
- West Virginia
1%-9%
- Arizona
- Colorado
- Hawaii
- Idaho
- Iowa
- North Dakota
- Utah
- Wisconsin
0%
- Alaska
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- Maine
- Massachusetts
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- Oregon
- Rhode Island
- Vermont
- Washington
White House Forms ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Commission
From Becker’s Leadership and Management
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order creating the Make America Healthy Again Commission after Robert Kennedy Jr. was confirmed Feb. 13 as HHS secretary in a 52-48 Senate vote.
Mr. Kennedy will chair the commission, which is tasked with investigating “the root causes of America’s escalating health crisis,” with an initial focus on pediatric chronic disease, according to a Feb. 13 White House fact sheet on the executive order.
The commission will release its childhood chronic disease assessment in the next 100 days and will follow up with a strategy to improve children’s health within the next 180 days. The key priorities of the investigation include funding studies on what causes disease, promoting healthier food, expanding preventative treatment options and increasing health research transparency.
“The commission aims to restore trust in medical and scientific institutions and hold public hearings, meetings, roundtables and similar events to receive expert input from leaders in public health,” the release said.
The commission also has four policy directives to help reverse chronic disease:
- Ensure open access and transparency to federally funded health research data while preventing conflicts of interest.
- Focus federally funded health research on high-quality studies to help understand the cause of American illness.
- Work with U.S. farmers to ensure food in America is affordable, abundant and healthy.
- Provide flexible health coverage and expand treatment options to support lifestyle-based disease prevention.
The release pointed to information consistent with CDC data that found 6 in 10 adults in the U.S. live with at least one chronic illness, and 4 in 10 have two or more. It also touched on a spike in autism rates, childhood cancers and overmedication, with more than 3.4 million children in the U.S. on medication for attention-deficit disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, with diagnoses on the rise, according to Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder data.
It also pointed to information consistent with a 2023 Gallup poll that found only one-third of Americans have trust in the U.S. health system.
During his two confirmation hearings on Jan. 29-30, Mr. Kennedy frequently discussed his Make America Healthy Again agenda, which aims to cut chronic disease, tackle obesity and diabetes, and improve food policy, prevention-based care and environmental health.
In his new role, Mr. Kennedy’s portfolio will comprise HHS agency and program oversight, as well as a nearly $2 trillion budget. Among the agencies under his purview are CDC, CMS, FDA and the National Institutes of Health.
2025 ARC States’ Co-Chair Elected: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore
Elected by his fellow Appalachian state governors, Maryland Governor Wes Moore is now ARC’s 2025 States’ Co-Chair. He is the 72nd States’ Co-Chair in ARC’s history.
In his year-long position, Gov. Moore will work alongside ARC’s Federal Co-Chair and his fellow governors to continue investing in economic growth and innovation across the region. In fiscal year 2024, ARC invested nearly $365 million in 583 projects, which attracted an additional $5 billion in private investments across Appalachia.
Learn more about Gov. Moore and ARC’s leadership structure. And join us in thanking 2024 States’ Co-Chair Tennessee Governor Bill Lee for his leadership and contributions.
Wright Center Sites Earn National Recognition
The Wright Center for Community Heath’s Clarks Summit and Mid Valley locations have learned national recognition from the National Committee for Quality Assurance for delivering top-quality, patient-centered care. Read more about the recognition.