Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and U.S. Rep. Nathaniel Moran, TX-01, visited The University of Texas at Tyler Health Science Center on Wednesday to participate in a roundtable discussion about the local impact the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) will have on East Texas communities.
Cornyn and Moran met with health care providers, educators, students and community leaders throughout East Texas to learn and hear how the impact of $281 million allocated to Texas over five years will help rural hospitals, clinics and providers to modernize health systems and meet access demands. The meeting occurred during National Public Health Week, which is celebrated annually during the first full week of April.
“It’s great to be back in Tyler and particularly with my colleague and friend Nathaniel Moran and to see all the great things that are happening here and will happen with this $50 billion of rural healthcare transformation fund,” Cornyn said. “We all know access to health care in rural Texas is really a concern.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in July 2025, established the RHTP, a $50 billion federal initiative administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) from 2026 to 2030, to help fund technology, workforce development and chronic disease management, which aims to strengthen rural health care infrastructure and increase access. Texas received $281,319,361 from the program, which is more than any other state that applied.
“It’s a hard problem,” Cornyn said. “The economics of rural culture are challenging, but as the population of our state grows, we continue to get high-quality, accessible care.”
Cornyn said he voted for the RHTP legislation and pushed with other members of the Texas congressional delegation to prioritize funding for Texas through a letter to Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator at CMS.
Kevin Lambing, RHTP consultant with Texas Organization of Rural Community Hospitals, said Texas submitted a competitive proposal with six initiatives and believes that year one of the program will focus on initiatives one, four and six.
“We have a plan at this time, but we will have what’s called NOFOs, Notices of Funding Opportunities, on each of the six initiatives that are in the plan,” Lambing said. “We don’t know at this time which one of the six initiatives will be distributed and we won’t know that until the Health and Human Services Commission defines that.”
The six approved funding initiatives include:
- Chronic disease management and prevention.
- Adoption of remote monitoring, robotics, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies.
- Recruitment and retention of a rural clinical workforce.
- Cybersecurity capability development.
- Opioid use disorder treatment services.
- Value-based care arrangements and alternative payment models.
“The state of Texas is hiring 30 folks to run the Rural Texas Strong program, (Texas’ application), and in the appropriations there was a max of 10% on administrative costs, that way 90% of the dollars actually get to the people that can use it,” Lambing said.
Moran said many Texans who live in rural areas struggle to find accessible care and the RHSP will allow funding for ideas and accessibility resources.
“In our district, we heard today from counties who had their rural hospital shut down and I know also one of our counties, Marion County, has no medical facility, no doctor, no pharmacy in that entire county,” Moran said. “That’s just not acceptable, so when we’re looking at these deserts, where there’s no opportunity for quick access to quality health care to exist, we’re looking for partnerships with folks like UT Health East Texas to go into these areas.”
Moran said the program will engage experts and local stakeholders to determine needs within those rural communities.
“We know the best ideas do not start and emanate in Washington D.C.,” Moran said. “In fact, they start and emanate with people at that roundtable that know what patient care is all about, that understand the hurdles and the obstacles that are standing in the way between what you want to do and what you can do at this moment, so we want to bridge that gap.”
The roundtable
Cornyn and Moran were joined by Dr. Julie Philley, president of UT Tyler, along with nine other stakeholders with various backgrounds in the health care industry.
“How we can deliver better for the patients and for the constituents here in East Texas and Northeast Texas is critically important because in the last 10 years 14 rural hospitals closed in Texas and 60% of the rural hospitals now don’t even deliver babies,” Moran said. “Those immediate need issues that are no longer being addressed in areas where it’s hard to access, we want to make sure we overcome those hurdles.”
Hopkins County Judge Robert Newsom, who sat on the panel, said last fall he suffered from a heart attack and without the financial support for the local hospital, he would have lost his life.
“One of the nurses was there and said, ‘You know two years ago we would have had to ship you to Tyler or we’d had to ship you to Dallas because we couldn’t do these things here, like the heart attack you have,’” Newsom said. “And I go, wow. What about now? The surgeon was there and he had a bunch of nurses lined up and by noon I was a new man. I’m so grateful because about 10 years ago, our hospital was in deep trouble and we just couldn’t do it.”
Newsom said Hopkins County then partnered with Christus Health and the county now has more services than ever before, demonstrating that extra resources save lives when disaster strikes.
Luke Schwartz, third-year med student and UT student regent at UT Tyler, said the RHTP will not just help train health care providers but also retain them in rural areas.
“From where I sit, that distinction versus training versus retaining is everything,” Schwartz said. “I believe retention starts during training and the more we expand rural clinical rotations, create residency pathways in rural hospitals and provide incentives that extend beyond graduation, the more we can start to build the workforce that stays in the communities they trained in.”
Schwartz said investments in telehealth and AI are critical to rural patient wellbeing, especially if they are hard to reach.
“At the end of the day rural health transformation isn’t just about structural funding, it’s about people,” Schwartz said. “For those of us who grew up here, the goal isn’t just to practice medicine, but it’s to give back to the community that got us to where we are today.”
Many local hospital and administrative leaders shared personal stories emphasizing the impact of rural health care access such as hospitals being essential entities to both healthcare and local economies and partnerships with larger systems to help keep facilities open. Many panelists also discussed challenges such as the difficulty of reaching specialists, high administrative burden, reimbursement and mental health issues and workforce shortages.
Each panelist spoke to Cornyn and Moran about their concerns and motivations from their perspective, which allowed them to further their knowledge about local issues rural Texans face every day, Philley said.
“I was raised and grew up in East Texas and love this part of the world,” Philley said. “The men to the right and to my left (Cornyn and Moran) have done a tremendous amount to help us in East Texas and invest in resources today and yesterday and they invested resources tomorrow to help our rural citizens.”
After the panel, Cornyn and Moran took a tour of UT Tyler’s new Helicopter Critical Care Transport Simulations Center before leaving.
For more information about the RHTP visit, https://www.cms.gov/priorities/rural-health-transformation-rht-program/overview.
For more information about the UT Tyler Health Science Center, visit https://www.uttyler.edu/academics/colleges-schools/health-science-center/.