{"id":5281,"date":"2025-10-15T18:27:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T18:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/5281\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T18:27:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T18:27:06","slug":"texas-rural-hospitals-want-a-piece-of-50b-in-federal-funds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/5281\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas rural hospitals want a piece of $50B in federal funds"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\tAudio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy<\/a>, and give us feedback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As Texas develops its application for a new rural health funding program, rural hospital leaders say the priority should be financial stabilization for their facilities.<\/p>\n

The recent sweeping tax and spending plan includes a $50 billion appropriation for the Rural Health Transformation program<\/a>. States will receive funding based<\/a> on applications they submit in early November.<\/p>\n

During an hours-long public hearing Monday to discuss the program, several hospital leaders raised concerns that without direct funding, the state may experience more rural hospital closures.<\/p>\n

Erin Clevenger, CEO of Memorial Medical Center in Port Lavaca, southeast of Victoria, said her hospital is high on the list of Texas hospitals at risk of closure.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery day is a battle to make sure we don\u2019t become one of those statistics,\u201d Clevenger said.<\/p>\n

In the last decade, Texas has lost 14 rural hospitals. Of the 156 rural hospitals currently in the state, about 70% have lost services, and more than half are at risk of closing, according to a report<\/a> from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.<\/p>\n

Memorial Medical Center is in the southern part of the state, but it provides critical services that benefit people across Texas \u2013 even patients in Dallas.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen even large urban hospitals could not take on more patients, we opened a COVID care unit and accepted their transfers, even flying patients in from Houston and Dallas,\u201d Clevenger said.<\/p>\n

Memorial Medical Center is a critical access hospital \u2013 a designation that rural hospitals can receive to reduce the financial vulnerability and keep essential services in rural communities. In order to receive the designation, Memorial Medical Center had to be more than 35 miles away from another hospital.<\/p>\n

The Rural Health Transformation Program is meant to focus on transformation and innovation, but Clevenger said the best way to support rural hospitals is through direct financial support for the first few years of the program.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout it, all the planning in the world will not matter because there will be no hospital left to transform,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Rural hospitals face challenges<\/a> that can be harder to address than in urban areas, including lack of access to transportation, internet and broadband.<\/p>\n

Jon Gill, CEO of Pampa Regional Medical Center in the panhandle, said Texas has made efforts to support rural health care, how those investments are made can lead to them being less effective.<\/p>\n

A large academic hospital in the panhandle received $1 million to provide maternal care in Pampa, but Gill said the organization didn\u2019t engage the local hospital to see what it was doing with maternal care.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring this time, it was discovered that they weren\u2019t going to be able to provide the care unless it was something along the lines of cancer care for maternal care,\u201d Gill said. \u201cThat would affect maybe one patient every three months where we didn\u2019t have basic maternal care being provided in this area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gill said rural hospitals involve and benefit from academic and larger hospital systems, but if rural hospitals aren\u2019t present and supported the community won\u2019t continue to receive care.<\/p>\n

Leaders of larger health systems advocated for the state to invest in telehealth programs or further research and data collection, but rural hospital leaders raised concerns about if those programs would be accessible.<\/p>\n

Kurt Sunderman is CEO of Rice Medical Center, a 25-bed critical access hospital in Eagle Lake, west of Houston. He said many larger health systems don\u2019t work with rural hospitals because \u201cthey don\u2019t have to,\u201d which can push rural hospitals out.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrograms like Telestroke and other telehealth services for major systems have become so unaffordable that they price rural hospitals out of participation altogether,\u201d he said. \u201cRural hospitals know what we need. We know how to stretch a dollar and when funds are put in our hands. They are spent conservatively and on the most critical needs of our patients.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sunderman said rural hospitals are able to collaborate and innovate with rural providers, hospitals and patients in mind.<\/p>\n

The Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, or TORCH, has its own telehealth program, which Rice Medical Center participates in. Sunderman said while rural hospitals can effectively work together to directly address concerns, when distributing funding, it doesn\u2019t end up going to rural hospitals.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead, urban, suburban, and university systems capture those dollars, and much of that funding disappears into overhead research or projects that never touch a rural patient,\u201d Sunderman said.<\/p>\n

The federal funding is significant for rural communities. Other policy changes in the tax and spending plan \u2014 including cuts to Medicaid, Medicare<\/a> and Affordable Care Act coverage<\/a> \u2013 are expected to significantly increase the uninsured rate<\/a> both in the state and nationally.<\/p>\n

Sunderman said if larger systems receive access to funding from the Rural Health Transformation program, the state needs to implement long-term cost controls and accountability measures.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not asking for special treatment,\u201d Sunderman said, \u201conly for the resources originally intended for rural transformation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[584,1562,4844,4843,5476,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-5281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-hospitals","tag-rural","tag-rural-health","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}