Unclear how much Pa. stands to gain from feds’ $50 billion rural hospital program

This story originally appeared on WITF.

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services opened up applications Monday for states to seek a share of a new $50 billion program that the White House is touting as transformative for rural health care.

With just a few weeks until applications are due and sole discretion over the distribution of funds resting in the hands of Mehmet Oz, the administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, it remains unclear how much money Pennsylvania stands to receive from the program.

Oz said that over the next five years, the new dollars would help states enhance preventive care, sustainable access to hospitals, workforce development, new care models and technology innovation.

“We can use this as an opportunity to pivot from the crisis that we are currently living in to the comeback that America expects from us,” Oz said during a call with reporters Monday morning. “If we’re going to be able to invest these monies wisely, we won’t just have health care systems barely hanging on in rural America — they’ll start to thrive.”

Oz said the application window will remain open until Nov. 5.

Half of the funds will be divided equally among every state that applies, with no consideration of states’ vastly different populations. The remaining half will be distributed at Oz’s discretion, which Politico reported has some health care officials concerned about how the funds would be doled out.

If states “don’t perform” adequately in the first year, Oz said the Trump administration can “claw back” some of the allocated money and give it to states “that are performing.” He did not specify how his agency would gauge the efficacy of how states spend their funds or what standards they would need to meet.

“This is not punitive,” he said, noting that the designers of the program saw it as a method of “quality control.”

The new program was included in the Republican Party’s tax and spending cuts law signed by President Donald Trump in July — largely to address some party members’ concerns over the legislation slashing hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid.

In Pennsylvania, about 37% of rural residents are covered by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to health policy research group KFF.

Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office did not respond to a question asking whether the commonwealth would apply for the new funds.