- CMS: Medicare Program; Prospective Payment System and Consolidated Billing for Skilled Nursing Facilities; Updates to the Quality Reporting Program for Federal Fiscal Year 2026
- CMS: Medicare Program; FY 2026 Hospice Wage Index and Payment Rate Update and Hospice Quality Reporting Program Requirements
- Public Inspection: CMS: Medicare Program: Prospective Payment System and Consolidated Billing for Skilled Nursing Facilities; Updates to the Quality Reporting Program for Federal Fiscal Year 2026
- Public Inspection: CMS: Medicare Program: Fiscal Year 2026 Hospice Wage Index and Payment Rate Update and Hospice Quality Reporting Program Requirements
- CMS: Request for Information; Health Technology Ecosystem
- VA: Staff Sergeant Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program Funding Opportunity
- State: 60-Day Notice of Proposed Information Collection: J-1 Visa Waiver Recommendation Application
- Public Inspection: CMS: Request for Information: Health Technology Ecosystem
- HHS: Request for Information (RFI): Ensuring Lawful Regulation and Unleashing Innovation To Make American Healthy Again
- VA: Solicitation of Nominations for the Appointment to the Advisory Committee on Tribal and Indian Affairs
- GAO Seeks New Members for Tribal and Indigenous Advisory Council
- VA: Staff Sergeant Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program Funding Opportunity
- Telehealth Study Recruiting Veterans Now
- USDA Delivers Immediate Relief to Farmers, Ranchers and Rural Communities Impacted by Recent Disasters
- Submit Nominations for Partnership for Quality Measurement (PQM) Committees
Critical Access Hospital Financial Sustainability Guide
This resource from the National Rural Health Resource Center provides guidance and assistance to state Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (Flex) Program personnel, leaders of Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs), and others helping CAHs manage long-term financial stability.
List of Hospitals in the U.S.
The Rural Health Research Program at the University of North Carolina (UNC) compiles a list of all hospitals operating in the U.S. as a downloadable resource to the public. The newest list has all acute care and specialty hospitals that were open as of January 1, 2023, including their addresses, bed counts, rural/urban definitions, CMS rural payment designations (Critical Access Hospitals, Rural Health Clinics, Rural Emergency Hospitals), and more. The UNC research center also keeps a running list of rural hospital closures since January 2005.
Overview of Residency Program Selected for Section 126 Round 3 Graduate Medical Education Slots
– Federal legislation under Section 126 the Consolidation Appropriation Act, 2021 authorizes the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to distribute additional residency positions (also known as slots) for physician training. RuralGME.org, the FORHP-supported organization that helps hospitals plan and develop rural residencies, has published an analysis of CMS released data on the 109 hospitals that received residency slots via the third round of Section 126 distributions on November 21, 2024. This analysis builds on FORHP’s previous examination of first and second round awardees and uses newly released CMS data to identify the rural status of the training sites of the selected residency programs. The application period for the next round of Medicare-funded slots opened the first week of January and runs through March 31, 2025. Eligible hospitals must use MEARIS, CMS’s online application system to apply for 200 newly available Section 126 slots and the 200 Section 4122 slots. The application period for Medicare-funded slots opened the first week of January and runs through March 31, 2025.
Rural Provider Participation in Medicare ACOs Grows
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Shared Savings Program Fast Facts, updates data on provider and beneficiary participation in an accountable care organization (ACO). An ACO is a group of healthcare providers that work together to coordinate care for Medicare patients. As of January 2025, 53.4 percent of beneficiaries in Traditional Medicare are enrolled in an accountable care relationship with a provider participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Innovation Center) accountable care models. In MSSP, the number of rural and safety net providers has grown since last year. There are now 2,872 Rural Health Clinics, 547 Critical Access Hospitals, and 7,036 Federally Qualified Health Centers participating.
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.
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