We Need a Long-Term Commitment to Rural Health Care

One of the defining elements of my career over the last many years is a commitment to investing in and sustaining our rural way of life in South Dakota, which includes protecting access to rural health care. It is one of the reasons I decided to run for Congress. The “Big Beautiful Bill” included an investment in rural health care that is reason for both optimism and a concern we could let an historic opportunity pass us by. Let me back up to explain what I mean.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” passed Congress and was signed by the President last summer. While I was pleased to see certain needed tax cuts extended for the middle class, I was dismayed to see nearly a trillion dollars in cuts to federal health care spending at a time when 71% of South Dakotans were already saying that cost was a major barrier to getting access to health care. To partially offset those cuts, Congress added a five-year, $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund.

South Dakota, and states around the country, have started to distribute resources from the Fund to build the rural health workforce and sustain rural hospitals, ambulance services, and maternal health care. While the roll-out of the funds has been rushed and a little haphazard, I believe we will, at a minimum, learn a lot about what works and doesn’t when it comes to rural health care. My concern is what we will do with those learnings.

While a five-year investment in rural health care could be a great start, we need a long-term commitment to sustaining access to care in rural places. As state leaders conducted listening sessions with community leaders across South Dakota, they heard from lots of people with innovative programs and a deep commitment to rural health care who were simply not able to sustain their work because health care payment models that were designed for urban places didn’t take rural realities into account.

Will we be able to learn from new programs and approaches that are developed over the next five years and invest in models that prove cost-effective and successful? Or will this historic rural health investment flow into the pockets of health technology companies and urban-based systems that don’t have a real commitment to sustaining rural health care providers and facilities? Will it simply disappear as quickly as it arrived?

If I am elected to be South Dakota’s voice in Congress, sustaining access to rural health care will be a top priority. And I will be committed to monitoring the investments being made through the Rural Health Transformation Fund to ensure that we are taking the lessons learned to build a stronger rural health care system that can be sustained for the long haul.